What is wrong with this recursive function?

1

I’m working on the steamroller challenge. I actually got this code (or something very similar? It’s possible I may have changed it unwillingly) to work, but because the function I wrote takes two arguments it didn’t pass the tests. So I decided to simply remove it and put it into its own function, and then I can pass it whatever arguments I want.

// takes two arguments. First is the array to
// flatten. arr2 is an empty array for storing
// the results.
function smasher(arr1,arr2){
  
// step through every element in arr1
for(i = 0; i < arr1.length; i++){
      
  // if it is NOT an array, push it into arr2 as it is.
      if(Array.isArray(arr1[i]) === false){
        arr2.push(arr1[i]);
        
        // if it IS an array, run it through this function again
        // then loop through the array it returns (x) and 
        // push all those values to arr2
      } else {
        var x = smasher(arr1[i],[]);
        for(j = 0; j < x.length; j++){
          arr2.push(x[j]);
        }
      }
}
  return arr2;
}

However, now no matter what I do, running this locks up the FCC page. What’s worse, it even locks up if I feed it a simple, non-nested array such as [1,2,3,4,5], so it should never even branch into the “else” statement and hit the recursive code.

I’ve been thinking about the logic here all day, and I simply cannot see where it is failing.

2

I don’t see anything wrong with it? I submitted it and it works for me

Can you post exactly what you’re submitting? I feel like there might be an issue in how you call Smasher

3

Alright, well, thank you for looking into it! You are probably right that it has something to do with how I was calling smasher, but at this point I’ve already gone and researched a different method of solving the problem (using Array.prototype.reduce, which was what I wanted to use instinctively at the start, anyway).

I’m less concerned about solving the challenge, and more with figuring out whether or not my logic was screwy. I feel much more at ease if other people tell me that I’m not crazy when I say this thing looks like it should work, haha.

4

Your logic seems fine, but there is a lot of unnecessary cruft there which could be cleaned up.

5

This seems like a code smell, you’re repeating code that in theory does the same thing the original code does. I havn’t played with it byond that but it seems like you’re writing a two -level recursive function, rather than one. Not sure if that makes sense. I may play with this later today if I have time.

6