Valid Palindrome

Problem:

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.

Solution 1:对称位置比较法(C++)

算法思路：

1.如果字符串为空或只存在一个字符，那么该字符串一定是回文；

2.处理该字符串，提取其中的数字或者字母保存到新的字符串converted中；

3.将converted字符串中所有字符转化为小写字符；然后比较所有对称位置的字符，如果有一对字符不相等，则为false，否则为true;

使用内建函数有：tolower()、isalnum()

<span style="font-size:18px;">    bool isPalindrome(string s) {
        locale loc;
        if(s.empty() || s.length() == 1)
            return true;
        int len = s.length();
        string converted;
        for(int i = 0 ;i < len; i++)
        {
            if(isalnum(s[i]))
                converted += tolower(s[i],loc); 
        }
//        cout<<"converted:"<<converted<<endl;
        
        if(converted.empty() || converted.length() == 1)
            return true;
        len = converted.length();
//        bool flag = true;
        for(int i = 0 ;i < len/2; i++)
        {
           if(converted[i] != converted[len - i - 1])
                return false;   
        }
        return true;
        
    }
};</span>

Solution 2:(Python)

算法思路：

1.反转字符串：s[::-1]

<span style="font-size:18px;">class Solution:
    # @param s, a string
    # @return a boolean
    def isPalindrome(self, s):
        converted = [i.lower() for i in s if i.isalnum()]
        return converted == converted[::-1]</span>

Solution 3:对称位置比较法，不采用extra space(C++)

算法思路：

1.设置首尾指针，每个指针遇到alnum就停止，然后对首尾指针进行比较。用while语句实现。

    bool isPalindrome(string s)
    {
        if(s.empty() || s.length() == 1)
            return true;
        int i = 0;
        int j = s.length() - 1;
        while(i < j)
        {
            while(i < j && !isalnum(s[i]))
                i ++;
            while(j > i && !isalnum(s[j]))
                j --;
            if(tolower(s[i]) != tolower(s[j]))
                return false;
            i ++;
            j --;
        }
        return true;