Breaking out of a recursion in java

Question

The recursion is sort of a \'divide and conquer\' style, it splits up while getting smaller (Tree data structure), and I want it to break completely if a violation is found,

Answer 1

What you are asking is the definition of recursion.

At some point all recursive paths should break. Otherwise it will be an infinite recursion and stack overflow exception occurs.

So you should design the recursion function like that. An example binary search in a sorted array:

BinarySearch(A[0..N-1], value, low, high) {
       if (high < low)
           return -1 // not found
       mid = low + ((high - low) / 2)  // Note: not (low + high) / 2 !!
       if (A[mid] > value)
           return BinarySearch(A, value, low, mid-1)
       else if (A[mid] < value)
           return BinarySearch(A, value, mid+1, high)
       else
           return mid // found
}