Valid Palindrome

Given a string, determine if it is a palindrome, considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring cases.

 Notice

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.

Have you met this question in a real interview? 

Yes

Example

"A man, a plan, a canal: Panama" is a palindrome.

"race a car" is not a palindrome.

注意：在使用正则表达式的时候需要使用replaceAll方法

public class Solution {
    /*
     * @param s: A string
     * @return: Whether the string is a valid palindrome
     */
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
        // write your code here
        if (s == null || s.length() == 0) {
            return true;
        }
        s = s.toLowerCase().trim().replaceAll("[^a-z0-9]", "");
        int left = 0, right = s.length() - 1;
        while (left < right) {
            if (s.charAt(left) != s.charAt(right)) {
                return false;
            }
            left++;
            right--;
        }
        return true;
    }
}