Recursive looping function in Python

Question

I have a database that models a foldering relationship to n levels of nesting. For any given folder, I want to generate a list of all child folders.

Assuming I have a function called getChildFolders(), what is the most efficient way to call this kind of recursive loop?

The following code works for 4 levels of nesting, but I'd like more flexibility in either specifying the depth of recursion, or in intelligently stopping the loop when there are no more children to follow.

folder_ids = []
folder_ids.append(folder.id)
for entry in child_folders:
    folder_ids.append(entry.id)
    child_folders_1 = getChildFolders(entry.id)
    for entry_1 in child_folders_1:
        folder_ids.append(entry_1.id)
        child_folders_2 = getChildFolders(entry_1.id)
        for entry_2 in child_folders_2:
            folder_ids.append(entry_2.id)
            child_folders_3 = getChildFolders(entry_2.id)
            for entry_3 in child_folders_3:
                folder_ids.append(entry_3.id)

Answer 1

A recursive function is a nice way to do this:

def collect_folders(start, depth=-1)
    """ negative depths means unlimited recursion """
    folder_ids = []

    # recursive function that collects all the ids in `acc`
    def recurse(current, depth):
        folder_ids.append(current.id)
        if depth != 0:
            for folder in getChildFolders(current.id):
                # recursive call for each subfolder
                recurse(folder, depth-1)

    recurse(start, depth) # starts the recursion
    return folder_ids

Answer 2

I generally avoid recursion like the plague in python because it's slow and because of the whole stack overflow error thing.

def collect_folders(start):
    stack = [start.id]
    folder_ids = []
    while stack:
        cur_id = stack.pop()
        folder_ids.append(cur_id)
        stack.extend(folder.id for folder in getChildFolders(cur_id))
    return folder_ids

This assumes that getChildFolders returns an empty list when there are no children. If it does something else, like return a sentinel value or raise an exception, then modifications will have to be made.