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A: A recursive method is one whose method body includes a call to itself, so that it is called repeatedly until an expected condition is met or it cannot continue the recursion any longer. These methods often take an object or numeric argument that is subject to progressive interrogation or mathematical processing at each pass. Recursive methods must be designed carefully to ensure that they do not result in a very deep or endless recursion, which is likely to cause an OutOfMemoryError.
A simple example of a recursive method is the getNodeByName(String) method below, which iterates through all child nodes in an object structure until it finds one that matches, or returns null.
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