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 == null || s.length() == 0) return true;
int start = 0;
int end = s.length() - 1;
while(start < end){
if(!isValid(s.charAt(start))){
start++;
continue;
}
if(!isValid(s.charAt(end))){
end--;
continue;
}
if(Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(start)) != Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(end))) return false;
start++;
end--;
}
return true;
}
private boolean isValid(char c){
return Character.isDigit(c) || Character.isLetter(c);
}
}