Python : printing lines of factorial “*” through recursion

Question

I have implemented a function to calculate the factorial from 1 to n(where n is the user input) by making a list, using recursion. And I want to print a line of k factorial stars for each integer k in range of 1 to n by defining a new function that calls itself recursively inside the main function. The output should be as follows if n=3:

*
**
******

Here is my code so far to calculate the factorial using recursion:

#Ask the user to input a positive integer n
n=int(input("Enter positive integer: "))

#Defining a function to calculate the factorial of a input number
def factorialN(n):

    #Defining the base case
    if n==1:

        #If it satisfy the base condition return a list containing 1
        return [1]

    #Calling the function factorialN() recursively
    list_1=factorialN(n-1)

    new_factorial=list_1[-1]*n

    list_1.append(new_factorial)

    return list_1

So I'm having a hard time in implementing the function to print the factorial stars("*"). Any help is much appreciated, as I'm a beginner in Python. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The function you wrote returns a list containing which line should have how many '*'s.

For n = 3 it returns: [1, 2, 6]

so to print them:

for x in output:
    print('*'*x) # print * x times

Answer 2

I agree with @Anonta's printing solution (+1), but if your only goal is to print stars, and not collect factorials into a list, then you can incorporate the printing into your code and simplify everything:

def factorialN(n):
    if n != 1:
        n *= factorialN(n - 1)

    print(n * '*')

    return n

number = int(input("Enter positive integer: "))

factorialN(number)

USAGE

Enter positive integer: 4
*
**
******
************************

Plus, as a bonus, factorialN(n) returns the factorial of n as a number!