ITT #13: Build a Menu with Recursive Functions

To continue my recent obsession with array handling, I want to spend this week talking about recursive functions and their application in dealing with arrays.

The goal of our exercise today is to build a menu, complete with sub-menu, all based off one function that runs recursively.

What Is Recursion? In computer science, recursion is a concept in which a function can call itself. This is similar to the idea of looping in PHP, but it provides an opportunity, in the case of array handling, to add more fine-grain control into a program.

On a basic level, recursion can be illustrated with the following code:

function plusOne($x) { if($x<10) { echo ++$x, "<br />"; plusOne($x); } else { echo 'Finished! <br />'; } } Calling this function will result in the following output:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Finished! Obviously, the above could have been accomplished very simply with a loop... read more

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