I’m pretty sure recursion is not the best way, but that is how you want to do it.

As this is for learning purposes, you might want to try different ways (if there are ), and then post the code of the different methods you have tried, and ask for recomendations about the best method.

Assuming this isn’t a homework question, there are two obvious recursive ways to do this (in pseudo-code, not C++):

function leftprint ( s : string ) : string
{
   print left( s , 1);
   if len(s) > 1 then leftprint ( substring (s , 2, len (s)) );
}

or

function rightprint ( s : string ) : string
{
   if len(s) > 1 then rightprint ( left ( s , len (s) - 1) );
   print right ( s, 1 );
}

The first is the simplest conceptually – just peel off and print the leftmost character, then call yourself with the remaining string after that.

The second is more interesting – it is “remembering” characters from the right during the descent, and printing them on the way back up.

Both produce the same result, but it is useful to understand the difference and when to use which style (hint – in this case, the first style is more efficient – “why” is left as an exercise for the student ).