Recursion extracting digits

Question

I need to write a a recursive function getdigits(n) that returns the list of digits in the positive integer n.

Example getdigits(124) => [1,2,4]

So far what I've got is:

def getdigits(n):
    if n<10:
        return [n]
    else:
        return [getdigits(n/10)]+[n%10]

But for 124 instead of [1, 2, 4] I get [[[1], 2], 4]

Working that in in my head it goes like:

getdigits(124) = [getdigits(12)] + [4]
getdigits(12) = [getdigits(1)] + [2]
get digits(1) = [1]

Therefore getdigits(124) = [1] + [2] + [4] = [1, 2, 4]

I figure there's something wrong in the second part of it as I can't see anything wrong with the condition, any suggestions without giving the entire solution away?

Solution 1

getDigits return a list, so why do you wrap the list into another one (last line)?

Solution 2

The same question has been answered before, see the link for more details.

def getdigits(n):
    if n < 10:
        return [n]
    return getdigits(n/10) + [n%10]

getdigits(123)
> [1, 2, 3]

The above will work for an integer n >= 0, notice that you don't have to wrap the result of getdigits(n/10) inside another list.