[LeetCode]Top Interview Questions/Easy Collection/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

Solution

Solution 1 (Using regex)

class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
        s = s.replaceAll("[^a-z^A-Z^0-9]", "");
        s = s.toLowerCase();
        for(int i = 0,j=s.length()-1;i!=j && i<j;i++,j--){
            if(s.charAt(i)!=s.charAt(j))
                return false;
        }
        return true;
    }
}

Solution 2

class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
        if(s == null || s.length() == 0){
            return true;
        }
        int left = 0 ;
        int right = s.length() - 1 ;
        while(left < right){
            while(left < right && !Character.isLetterOrDigit(s.charAt(left))){
                left++;
            }
            while(left < right && !Character.isLetterOrDigit(s.charAt(right))){
                right--;
            }
            if(!(Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(left)) == Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(right)))){
                return false;
            }
            left ++;
            right --;
        }
        return true;
    }
}