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125. Valid Palindrome

Two Pointers String

Problem - Valid Palindrome

Easy

A phrase is a palindrome if, after converting all uppercase letters into lowercase letters and removing all non-alphanumeric characters, it reads the same forward and backward. Alphanumeric characters include letters and numbers.

Given a string s, return true if it is a palindrome, or false otherwise.

 

Example 1:

Input: s = "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama"
Output: true
Explanation: "amanaplanacanalpanama" is a palindrome.

Example 2:

Input: s = "race a car"
Output: false
Explanation: "raceacar" is not a palindrome.

Example 3:

Input: s = " "
Output: true
Explanation: s is an empty string "" after removing non-alphanumeric characters.
Since an empty string reads the same forward and backward, it is a palindrome.

 

Constraints:

  • 1 <= s.length <= 2 * 105
  • s consists only of printable ASCII characters.

Solutions

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class Solution:
    def isPalindrome(self, s: str) -> bool:
        i, j = 0, len(s) - 1
        while j > i:
            if not s[i].isalnum():
                i += 1
            elif not s[j].isalnum():
                j -= 1
            elif s[i].lower() != s[j].lower():
                return False
            else:
                i, j = i + 1, j - 1

        return True

Submission Stats:

  • Runtime: 3 ms (98.94%)
  • Memory: 18.2 MB (55.43%)