Leetcode: Valid Palindrome

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

For example,
"A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" is a palindrome.
"race a car" is not a palindrome.

Note:
Have you consider that the string might be empty? This is a good question to ask during an interview.

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

public class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
        if (s == null) {
            return true;
        }
        
        s=s.toLowerCase();
        int left = 0;
        int right = s.length() - 1;
        while (left < right) {
            while (left < right && !isValid(s.charAt(left))) {
                left++;
            }
            while (left < right && !isValid(s.charAt(right))) {
                right--;
            }
            if (s.charAt(left) != s.charAt(right)) {
                return false;
            }
            left++;
            right--;
        }
        
        return true;
    }
    
    private boolean isValid(char a) {
        if ((a >= 'a' && a <= 'z') || (a >= '0' && a <= '9')) {
            return true;
        } else {
            return false;
        }
    }
}