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.
class Solution {
public:
bool isalpha(char cur) {
if(cur <= 'z' && cur >= 'a')
return true;
if(cur <= 'Z' && cur >= 'A')
return true;
if(cur <= '9' && cur >= '0')
return true;
return false;
}
char tolowercase(char cur) {
int gap = 'a' - 'A';
if(cur <= 'Z' && cur >= 'A') {
cur += gap;
}
return cur;
}
bool isPalindrome(string s) {
int left = 0;
int right = s.length() - 1;
while(left <= right) {
// Find the first alphabactical from left
while(left <= right && !isalpha(s[left]))
left ++;
// Find the first one from right
while(left <= right && !isalpha(s[right]))
right --;
if(left >= right)
return true;
if(tolowercase(s[left]) != tolowercase(s[right]))
return false;
left ++;
right --;
}
return true;
}
};