LeetCode125. Valid Palindrome

125.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.

方法一：超时

public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
    if(s.length() == 0) return true;      
    List<Character> a = new ArrayList<>();
    List<Character> b = new ArrayList<>();
    for(int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++){
        if(s.charAt(i) >= 'a' && s.charAt(i) <= 'z' ||s.charAt(i) >= 'A' && s.charAt(i) <= 'Z'|| s.charAt(i) >= '0' && s.charAt(i) <= '9'){
            a.add(s.charAt(i));
        }
    }
    for(int i = 0; i < a.size(); i++){
        b.add(0, a.get(i));
    }       
    if(String.valueOf(a).equalsIgnoreCase(String.valueOf(b))){
        return true;
    }   
    return false;
}

方法二：
设置一首一尾两个指针，每次比较两个指针指向的字符是否相等，若相等，则首指针向后移一个位置，尾指针向前移一个位置。

public boolean isPalindrome2(String s) {
    if (s.isEmpty()) {
        return true;
    }
    int head = 0, tail = s.length() - 1;
    char cHead, cTail;
    while(head <= tail) {
        cHead = s.charAt(head);
        cTail = s.charAt(tail);
        if (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(cHead)) {
            head++;
        } else if(!Character.isLetterOrDigit(cTail)) {
            tail--;
        } else {
            if (Character.toLowerCase(cHead) != Character.toLowerCase(cTail)) {
                return false;
            }
            head++;
            tail--;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

方法三：
这个方法用到了正则表达式，并用到了StringBuffer类自带的reverse函数。

public boolean isPalindrome3(String s) {
    String actual = s.replaceAll("[^A-Za-z0-9]", "").toLowerCase();
    String rev = new StringBuffer(actual).reverse().toString();
    return actual.equals(rev);
}

注意：
字符串比较应该用equals（）方法，不能用 == 号。