Given a string, determine if it is a palindrome, considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring cases.
Have you met this question in a real interview? Yes
Example
“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama” is a palindrome.
“race a car” is not a palindrome.
public class Solution {
/**
* @param s A string
* @return Whether the string is a valid palindrome
*/
public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
if (s == null || s.isEmpty()) return true;
int l = 0, r = s.length() - 1;
while (l < r) {
// find left alphanumeric character
if (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(s.charAt(l))) {
l++;
continue;
}
// find right alphanumeric character
if (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(s.charAt(r))) {
r--;
continue;
}
// case insensitive compare
if (Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(l)) == Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(r))) {
l++;
r--;
} else {
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
}