What are the best practices for understanding and implementing recursion in PHP?

Understanding recursion in PHP involves grasping the concept of a function calling itself within its own body. To implement recursion effectively, it is crucial to have a clear base case that will stop the recursive calls. Additionally, it is important to ensure that the recursive function is making progress towards the base case with each recursive call.

// Example of a recursive function to calculate factorial
function factorial($n) {
    if ($n <= 1) {
        return 1; // base case
    } else {
        return $n * factorial($n - 1); // recursive call
    }
}

// Usage
echo factorial(5); // Output: 120