[LC] 125. Valid Palindrome

Given a string, determine if it is a palindrome, considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring cases.

Note: For the purpose of this problem, we define empty string as valid palindrome.

Example 1:

Input: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama"
Output: true

Example 2:

Input: "race a car"
Output: false

class Solution(object):
    def isPalindrome(self, s):
        """
        :type s: str
        :rtype: bool
        """
        if s is '':
            return True
        import string
        valid = set(string.ascii_letters + string.digits) 
        s_cp = s[:].lower()
        left, right = 0, len(s) - 1
        while left <= right:
            if s_cp[left] not in valid:
                left += 1
            elif s_cp[right] not in valid:
                right -= 1
            elif s_cp[left] != s_cp[right]:
                return False
            else:
                left += 1
                right -= 1
        return True

 

class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(String s) {
        if (s.length() == 0) {
            return true;
        }
        char[] charArr = s.toCharArray();
        int left = 0, right = s.length() - 1;
        while (left < right) {
            if (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(charArr[left])) {
                left += 1;
            } else if (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(charArr[right])) {
                right -= 1;
            } else if (Character.toUpperCase(charArr[left]) != Character.toUpperCase(charArr[right])) {

                return false;
            } else {
                left += 1;
                right -= 1;
            }
        }
        return true;
    }
}