C#: How to "unroll" a "recursive" structure

Question

Not sure how to call it, but say you have a class that looks like this:

class Person
{
    public string Name;
    public IEnumerable<Person> Friends;
}

You then have a person and you want to "unroll" this structure recursively so you end up with a single list of all people without duplicates.

How would you do this? I have already made something that seems to be working, but I am curious to see how others would do it and especially if there is something built-in to Linq you can use in a clever way to solve this little problem :)

---

Here is my solution:

public static IEnumerable<T> SelectRecursive<T>(this IEnumerable<T> subjects, Func<T, IEnumerable<T>> selector)
{
    // Stop if subjects are null or empty
    if(subjects == null)
        yield break;

    // For each subject
    foreach(var subject in subjects)
    {
        // Yield it
        yield return subject;

        // Then yield all its decendants
        foreach (var decendant in SelectRecursive(selector(subject), selector))
            yield return decendant;
    }
}

Would be used something like this:

var people = somePerson.SelectRecursive(x => x.Friends);

Answer 1

I don't believe there's anything built into LINQ to do this.

There's a problem with doing it recursively like this - you end up creating a large number of iterators. This can be quite inefficient if the tree is deep. Wes Dyer and Eric Lippert have both blogged about this.

You can remove this inefficiency by removing the direct recursion. For example:

public static IEnumerable<T> SelectRecursive<T>(this IEnumerable<T> subjects,
    Func<T, IEnumerable<T>> selector)
{
    if (subjects == null)
    {
        yield break;
    }

    Queue<T> stillToProcess = new Queue<T>(subjects);

    while (stillToProcess.Count > 0)
    {
        T item = stillToProcess.Dequeue();
        yield return item;
        foreach (T child in selector(item))
        {
            stillToProcess.Enqueue(child);
        }
    }
}

This will also change the iteration order - it becomes breadth-first instead of depth-first; rewriting it to still be depth-first is tricky. I've also changed it to not use Any() - this revised version won't evaluate any sequence more than once, which can be handy in some scenarios. This does have one problem, mind you - it will take more memory, due to the queuing. We could probably alleviate this by storing a queue of iterators instead of items, but I'm not sure offhand... it would certainly be more complicated.

One point to note (also noted by ChrisW while I was looking up the blog posts :) - if you have any cycles in your friends list (i.e. if A has B, and B has A) then you'll recurse forever.

Answer 2

You could use a non-recursive method like this as well:

  HashSet<Person> GatherAll (Person p) {
     Stack<Person> todo = new Stack<Person> ();
     HashSet<Person> results = new HashSet<Person> ();
     todo.Add (p); results.Add (p);
     while (todo.Count > 0) {
        Person p = todo.Pop (); 
        foreach (Person f in p.Friends) 
           if (results.Add (f)) todo.Add (f);
     }
     return results;
  }

This should handle cycles properly as well. I am starting with a single person, but you could easily expand this to start with a list of persons.

Answer 3

Recursion is always fun. Perhaps you could simplify your code to:

public static IEnumerable<T> SelectRecursive<T>(this IEnumerable<T> subjects, Func<T, IEnumerable<T>> selector) {
    // Stop if subjects are null or empty 
    if (subjects == null || !subjects.Any())
        return Enumerable.Empty<T>();

    // Gather a list of all (selected) child elements of all subjects
    var subjectChildren = subjects.SelectMany(selector);

    // Jump into the recursion for each of the child elements
    var recursiveChildren = SelectRecursive(subjectChildren, selector);

    // Combine the subjects with all of their (recursive child elements).
    // The union will remove any direct parent-child duplicates.
    // Endless loops due to circular references are however still possible.
    return subjects.Union(recursiveChildren);
}

It will result in less duplicates than your original code. However their might still be duplicates causing an endless loop, the union will only prevent direct parent(s)-child(s) duplicates.

And the order of the items will be different from yours :)

Edit: Changed the last line of code to three statements and added a bit more documentation.

Answer 4

use the Aggregate extension...

    List<Person> persons = GetPersons(); 
    List<Person> result = new List<Person>(); 
    persons.Aggregate(result,SomeFunc);

    private static List<Person> SomeFunc(List<Person> arg1,Person arg2)
    {
    arg1.Add(arg2)
    arg1.AddRange(arg2.Persons);
    return arg1;
    }