Optimizing a Recursive Method In PHP

[mako]

I'm writing a text tag parser and I'm currently using this recursive method to create tags of n words. Is there a way that it can be done non-recursively or at least be optimized? Assume that $this->dataArray could be a very large array.\[code\]/** * A recursive function to add phrases to the tagTracker array * @param string $data * @param int $currentIndex * @param int $depth */ protected function compilePhrase($data, $currentIndex, $depth){ if (!empty($data)){ if ($depth >= $this->phraseStart){ $this->addDataCount($data, $depth); } if ($depth < $this->phraseDepth){ $currentIndex = $currentIndex + 1; //$this->dataArray is an array containing all words in the text $data .= ' '.$this->dataArray[$currentIndex]; $depth += 1; $this->compilePhrase($data, $currentIndex, $depth); } }}\[/code\]