recursion - Recursive Generators in JavaScript

Question

I am trying to write a recursive generator for an in order traversal.

class Tree {
  *inOrderTraversal() {
    function* helper(node) {
      if (node.left !== null) {
        // this line is executed, but helper is not being called
        helper(node.left); 
      }
      yield node.value;
      if (node.right !== null) {
        helper(node.right);
      }
    }

    for (let i of helper(this.root)) {
      yield i;
    }
  }
  // other methods omitted
}

And I am calling the generator like so:

const tree = new Tree();
tree.add(2);
tree.add(1);
tree.add(3);

for (let i of tree.inOrderTraversal()) {
    console.log(i); // only prints 2
}

Why is the generator only yielding 2? Why is it at least not yielding 1 before 2?

How can I fix this?

If it helps, I am transpiling the code using babel.

babel --optional runtime test.js | node

Answer 1

The problem was not with the recursion. Your function did call itself recursively, it just didn't yield values outside. When you call helper(), you get an iterator as a return value, but you wanted the iterated values of that iterator to be yielded. If you want to yield recursively, you need to yield *. Try like this:

  * inOrderTraversal() {
    function* helper(node) {
      if (node.left !== null) {
        // this line is executed, but helper is not being called
        yield * helper(node.left); 
      }
      yield node.value;
      if (node.right !== null) {
        yield * helper(node.right);
      }
    }

    for (let i of helper(this.root)) {
      yield i;
    }
  }

And while you're at it, you can replace the for loop with:

yield * helper(this.root)