Using Recursion, how do I get my code to reiterate?-CodePudding

My assignment is to find out how many times it takes for num1 to be divided by num2 before its a whole number, using recursion. My current code is

def fraction_count(num1, num2):
    times = int(0)
    result = num1/num2
    num1 = int(result)
    if result%2 == 0:
        return times
    if (num1/num2)%2 != 0:
        return times   1
print(fraction_count(32,3))

Expected is:

fraction_count(32, 3) → 2 # 32 → 10.667 → 3.333 → 1; 1 is whole → 2

So I have the output of 1 right now because its just running through once. What am I missing here?

CodePudding user response：

Riffing off of Nin17's answer but fulfilling the assignment's requirement to make it recursive yields:

def fraction_count(num1, num2):
    num1 = int(num1)
    num2 = int(num2)
    if num1 % num2 == 0:
        return 0
    return 1   fraction_count(num1 // num2, num2)

You can make it a tad faster by eliminating the type conversions if num1 and num2 are guaranteed to be integers. With type hinting (added in python 3.5), the code becomes:

def fraction_count(num1: int, num2: int) -> int:
    if num1 % num2 == 0:
        return 0
    return 1   fraction_count(num1 // num2, num2)

Short and sweet. Recursion may be less efficient than looping, but it often delivers concise code.

CodePudding user response：

The question is confusing, but this implements something similar to your example and provides the desired result for fraction_count(32, 3)

def fraction_count(num1, num2):
    num1 = int(num1)
    num2 = int(num2)
    count = 0
    while num1 % num2:
        num1 //= num2
        count  = 1
    return count