Why is php recursive

By Priya Pedamkar. The programming languages provide the use of several functionalities that enable us to develop simple and complicated applications. The functionalities have been implemented in the program using keywords that are written in the statement to satisfy the requirement. The functionalities endorse the application development, which is facilitated by the logic. Recursion may be considered an approach that lets us call the function by the statement written. We will be implementing recursion in PHP using the function.

Before we get into the depth of recursion, keep in mind that the actual meaning of recursion is in programming terms. Below we are learning about PHP recursive function examples:.

To understand the concept of recursion, let us consider some examples. In this example, we will be using the method to print the number, but the only way it will be different from the other program is by the use of recursion in this. This is because we will be calling the function from the statement defined within the same function.

To provide the functionality of recursion, we will be putting the login in the way so that it calls the function over and over till a particular condition gets satisfied. Could you show how to create and access a recursive function inside a class and return an array?

Thanks for responding, but I have a hard time working with the resulting array. Something like this:. That might fix it. Your email address will not be published. All rights reserved. What is recursion? View Demo ». Comments Not a bad article, but in my seven years of PHP programming, I probably used recursion two or three times.

Also, it is generally better to use a DirectortyIterator for directory traversals. Matt Another great article! Thank you. Matt Thanks for responding, but I have a hard time working with the resulting array. Others not so much. PHP brings its own set of challenges to the table in this regard.

Personally, the more I use recursion, the more naturally it comes to me. Which in itself is sort of recursive, I guess. The problem is not recursion itself. PHP is perfectly capable of having a function call itself. Take this function for calculating the middle characters of a string:.

The real problem is in the way PHP references variables and functions. This has the effect as to make this function unusable for most practical situations. How to modify external variable from inside recursive function using userdata argument.

If you are wanting to change the values of an existing multi-dimensional array, as it says above in the note, you need to specify the first argument as a reference. Unfortunately the PHP example given doesn't do this. It actually took me a while to figure out why my function wasn't changing the original array, even though I was passing by reference.

Here's the tip: Don't return any value from the function! This is rather counter-intuitive since the vast majority of functions return a value. Oh, it ran your function recursively alright, but changed all the values in the local function scope only and returns a boolean as the documentation states. The description says "If funcname needs to be working with the actual values of the array, specify the first parameter of funcname as a reference.

One option would be to create a version of these like so.