Recursive Generator Functions

You can find previous post about Python generator function here

This is something I haven't used very often but came up in a discussion.

We know the generator function and recursive function. How do we create a generator function which is recursive !!!

For example, if we have a binary tree and performing in-order traversal. A recursive function looks like this -

l = []
def in_order(root):
    if root:
            in_order(root.left)
            l.append(root)
            in_order(root.right) 

in_order(root)
for node in l:
    do_some_thing(node)

This is a standard implementation. You get all the elements of tree in a list and then iterate over that .

To convert this to a generator function, we have to use yield with the current value of node (the one which we want to return).

def in_order(root):
        if root:
                in_order(root.left)
                yield(root)
                in_order(root.right)

Once we use yield in this function, the return type of this function changes to a generator function. That means in_order(root) will return an generator object and to get a value out of that, we have to iterate over that .

def in_order(root):
        if root:
                in_order(root.left)
                yield(root)
                in_order(root.right)

    for node in in_order(root):
         do_some_thing(node)

But this change alone won't make it work. If you see, this recursive function internally use in_order(root.left) and in_order(root.right) which again is going to return a generator. Hence to actually do some thing in these recursive calls, we will have to use yield in those calls as well.

def in_order(root):
    if root:
            for node in in_order(root.left):
                yield node
            yield(root)
            for node in in_order(root.right):
                yield node

 for node in in_order(root):
     do_some_thing(node)

This makes it a recursive generator function. The simple rule is - use yield with the value that we want to return and and since recursive calls also returns generator function, use a for loop - yield to get the value from those .

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