Recursion

[William Park]

Abhijit Soman <abhijit_som at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
> In the recursive function below i want to add the individual bits to a 
> string and return that string to the caller
> Can anyone tell me how to do that
> 
> 
>    def showbits(x):
>        if x != 1:
>          showbits(x >> 1)        
>        if x & 01:
>            print 1,
>        else:
>            print 0,

You forgot to return string '1' or '0', and then append to output.  Try
    
    def showbits(x):
	if x == 0: return ''
	if x & 1:
	    return showbits(x>>1) + '1'
	else:
	    return showbits(x>>1) + '0'

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
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