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.
public class Solution {
public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
if (s.isEmpty()) {
return true;
}
int head = 0, tail = s.length() - 1;
while (head < tail) {
while (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(s.charAt(head)) && head < tail) {
head++;
}
while (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(s.charAt(tail)) && tail > head) {
tail--;
}
if (Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(head)) != Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(tail))) {
return false;
}
head++;
tail--;
}
return true;
}
}