125. Valid Palindrome

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

12ms 39.48%

public static boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
		if (s == null || s.length() == 0) {
			return true;
		}
		int start = 0;
		int end = s.length() - 1;
		while (start < end) {
			while (start < s.length() && !isValid(s.charAt(start))) {
				start++;
			}
			if (start == s.length()) { // Don't miss this!!!!!!!
				return true;
			}
			char a = Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(start));
			while (end >= 0 && !isValid(s.charAt(end))) {
				end--;
			}
			char b = Character.toLowerCase(s.charAt(end));
			if (a != b) {
				return false;
			} else {
				start++;// Don't miss this !!!!!!!
				end--;
			}
		}
		return true;
	}

	private static boolean isValid(char c) {
		return Character.isLetter(c) || Character.isDigit(c);
	}
	

Solution 2 Similar solution but we'd better take care of the edge cases carefully.

In the first solution, we used two while loops to locate the first and last valid char, if start == length means that we have reached the end and didn't find any valid char

In the second solution, we increment the start step by step in the while loop, notice the condition : start < end (end == s.length() - 1), end is the last char of the string and at this time start is the second last char, so program jumps out because it doesn't need to check the last char, this method saves some time.

11ms 47.29

public class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
       int size = s.length(), i = 0, j = size - 1;
        s = s.toLowerCase();

        while (i < j) {
            if (!(s.charAt(i) >= 'a' && s.charAt(i) <= 'z') && !(s.charAt(i) >= '0' && s.charAt(i) <= '9')) {
                i++;
            }
            else if (!(s.charAt(j) >= 'a' && s.charAt(j) <= 'z') && !(s.charAt(j) >= '0' && s.charAt(j) <= '9')) {
                j--;
            }
            else {
                if (s.charAt(i) != s.charAt(j)) return false;

                i++;
                j--;
            }
        }

        return true;
    }
}