C Exercises: Find the Factorial of a number

Last update on March 20 2025 12:37:51 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

10. Factorial Recursion Variants

Write a program in C to find the Factorial of a number using recursion.

Pictorial Presentation:

Sample Solution:

C Code:

#include<stdio.h>
int findFactorial(int);

int main()
{
  int n1,f;
	printf("\n\n Recursion : Find the Factorial of a number :\n");
	printf("-------------------------------------------------\n");	  
  printf(" Input  a number : ");
  scanf("%d",&n1);
  f=findFactorial(n1);//call the function findFactorial for factorial
  printf(" The Factorial of %d is : %d\n\n",n1,f);
  return 0;
}

int findFactorial(int n)
{
   if(n==1)
       return 1;
   else
       return(n*findFactorial(n-1));// calling the function findFactorial to itself recursively
 }

Sample Output:

 Recursion : Find the Factorial of a number :                                                                 
-------------------------------------------------                                                             
 Input  a number : 5                                                                                          
 The Factorial of 5 is : 120

Explanation:

int findFactorial(int n)
{
   if(n==1)
       return 1;
   else
       return(n*findFactorial(n-1));// calling the function findFactorial to itself recursively
 }

The function findFactorial() takes an integer parameter 'n' and returns an integer as the factorial of that number.

The function first checks if 'n' is equal to 1. If it is, then the function returns 1, which is the base case of the recursion. Otherwise, the function recursively calls itself with a parameter of 'n-1' and multiplies the result with 'n'. This continues until the base case is reached (i.e., n=1), at which point the function starts to return the product of 'n' and the result of the recursive call for 'n-1'.

Time complexity and space complexity:

The time complexity of this function is O(n) because the function needs to recursively call itself 'n' times to calculate the factorial of 'n'.

The space complexity is also O(n) because the function call stack will contain 'n' function calls at its peak.

Flowchart:

For more Practice: Solve these Related Problems:

Write a C program to compute the factorial of a number using tail recursion.
Write a C program to count the number of recursive calls made while computing factorial.
Write a C program to compute the double factorial (n!!) of a number recursively.
Write a C program to calculate factorials of large numbers using recursion and store the result as a string.

C Programming Code Editor:

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