If a string is Palindromic

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.

这个题相当直观，这次做的时候我直接call Java String里面的toLowerCase, 这样就不需要考录比如 ‘X’ 和 ‘x' 其实是同一个字母的问题了

public class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
        s = s.trim().toLowerCase();
        int len = s.length();
        int start = 0, end = len-1;
        while(start < end){ // if it terminates with start == end, it is a palindrome: e.g. "aba"
            while(start < end && !isAlphaNumeric(s.charAt(start)))      start ++;
            while(start < end && !isAlphaNumeric(s.charAt(end)))     end--;
            if(start == end)    break;
            if(s.charAt(start) != s.charAt(end))        return false;
            else{
                start++;
                end --;
            }
        }
        
        return true;
    }
    
    public boolean isAlphaNumeric(char ch){
        if(ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z')  return true;
        else if(ch <= '9' && ch >= '0')     return true;
        else    return false;
    }
}