[LeetCode] Valid Palindrome

Given a string, determine if it is a palindrome,

considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring cases.

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.

For example,

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

"race a car" is not a palindrome.

Idea: Palindrome, means the characters are symmetric about a characters.

 we could use the start pointer and end pointer to check whether they are equal.

//O(n) time, O(1)space

class Solution {
public:
    bool isPalindrome(string s) {
        int size = s.size();
        
        if(size == 0) return true;
        
        int start = 0;
        int end = size - 1;
        while(start < end)
        {
            if(!isAlphanum(s[start]))
            {
                start++;
                continue;
            }
            
            if(!isAlphanum(s[end]))
            {
                end--;
                continue;
            }
            
            if(!isSame(s[start], s[end]))
            {
                return false;
            }
            else
            {
                start++;
                end--;
            }
        }
        
        return true;
        
    }
    
private:
    bool isAlphanum(char ch)
    {
        if(ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z' || ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z' || ch >= '0' && ch <= '9')
            return true;
        else
            return false;
    }

private:
    bool isSame(char a, char b)
    {
        if(a == b || a == b + 32 || a == b - 32)
            return true;
        else
            return false;
    }
};