I am trying to write a recursive C# function that will operate on generic dictionaries of the form IDictionary<string, T> where T is either another IDictionary<string, T> or a string.

My first failed attempt looked something like this:

public string HandleDict(IDictionary<string, string> dict){
    // handle the leaf-node here
}

public string HandleDict<T>(IDictionary<string, IDictionary<string, T>> dict){
    // loop through children
    foreach(string key in dict.Keys){
        HandleDict(dict[key]);
    }
}

I also tried variants of HandleDict<T>(IDictionary<string, T>) where T : IDictionary<string, T> but that also doesn't quite work. I know that what I want to do could be achieved through a custom class as the parameter instead of dictionaries, and that my attempts are conceptually flawed (there's no end to the recursion in the generic function). I would still like to know if there is actually a way to do what I want here using just generic IDictionaries.