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.

Tags

Two Pointers, String

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

regex: 

\W 匹配一个非单子字符

g global search

i insensitive case search

/**
 * @param {string} s
 * @return {boolean}
 */
var isPalindrome = function(s) {
    s = s.replace(/\W/g, '').toLowerCase();
    
    var len = s.length;
    if(len < 2) {
        return true;
    }
    
    var start=0, end = len-1;
    while(start < end) {
        if(s[start] !== s[end]) {
            return false;
        } else {
            start++;
            end--;
        }
    }
    
    return true;
};

// Use as less API as possible

/**
 * @param {string} s
 * @return {boolean}
 */
var isPalindrome = function(s) {
    s=s.trim();
    var len = s.length;
    if(len<=1) {
        return true;
    }
    
    var start=0, end=len-1;
    while(start<end) {
        while(!s[start].match(/[a-zA-Z0-9]/g) && start<len && start<end) {
            start++;
        }
        
        while(!s[end].match(/[a-zA-Z0-9]/g) && end>=0 && end>start) {
            end--;
        }
        
        if(s[start].toLowerCase() !== s[end].toLowerCase()) {
            return false;
        } else {
            start++;
            end--;
        }
    }
    
    return true;
};