[Leetcode] Valid Palindrome

题目：

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.

思路：没有特殊技巧，双指针向中间移动，过滤掉无效字符。

class Solution {
public:
    bool is_valid(char c) {
        return (c >= 'a' && c <= 'z') || (c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z') 
                || (c >= '0' && c <= '9');
    }
    
    bool same_letter(char c1, char c2) {
        if (c1 >= 'A' && c1 <= 'Z') c1 = 'a' + c1 - 'A';
        if (c2 >= 'A' && c2 <= 'Z') c2 = 'a' + c2 - 'A';
        return c1 == c2;
    }
    
    bool isPalindrome(string s) {
        if (s.size() <= 1) return true;
        int start = 0;
        int end = (int)s.size() - 1;
        while (start < end) {
            // find the valid character
            while (!is_valid(s[start]) && start < end) start++;
            while (!is_valid(s[end]) && end > start) end--;
            // compare
            if (!same_letter(s[start], s[end])) return false;
            start++;
            end--;
        }
        return true;
    }
};

总结：复杂度O(n).