Leetcode Algorithm

Valid Palindrome

Given a string, determine if it is a palindrome, considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring cases.

Note: For the purpose of this problem, we define empty string as valid palindrome.

Example 1:

Input: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama"
Output: true

Example 2:

Input: "race a car"
Output: false

Constraints:

• s consists only of printable ASCII characters.

Solution:

class Solution:
    def isPalindrome(self, s: str) -> bool:
        N = len(s)
        left = 0
        right = N - 1
        while left < N - 1 and not s[left].isalnum():
            left += 1
        while right > 0 and not s[right].isalnum():
            right -= 1
        while left < right:
            if s[left].lower() != s[right].lower():
                return False
        
            left += 1
            while not s[left].isalnum():
                left += 1
            right -= 1
            while not s[right].isalnum():
                right -= 1
        return True
       

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Reference