Problem 5: Palindrome Checker

Hey everyone! 👋

Continuing with our coding challenges series! Today we're looking at a classic string manipulation problem: checking for palindromes.

The Problem

A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters that reads the same forward and backward (ignoring spaces, punctuation, and capitalization).

Examples:

• "racecar" -> True

• "A man a plan a canal Panama" -> True

• "hello" -> False

The Solution

Here is a clean Python solution that handles case insensitivity and ignores spaces:

def is_palindrome(s):
    """
    Checks if a string is a palindrome.
    Ignores case and spaces.
    """
    s = str.lower(s)
    s = s.replace(" ", "")
    return s == s[::-1]

# Test cases
print(is_palindrome("wilabaliw"))
# Output: True
print(is_palindrome("A man a plan a canal Panama"))
# Output: True

Code Breakdown

Let's break down how this works:

1. s = str.lower(s)

   • First, we convert the entire string to lowercase. This ensures that "Racecar" and "racecar" are treated as the same string.

2. s = s.replace(" ", "")

   • Next, we remove all spaces. This is important for phrases like "A man a plan..." where the spaces don't match up when reversed, but the letters do.

3. return s == s[::-1]

   • This is the Pythonic magic! s[::-1] creates a reversed copy of the string.

   • We simply compare the cleaned original string with its reverse. If they are equal, it returns True; otherwise, False.

Short, sweet, and effective!

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Stay tuned for more challenges! Happy coding! 💻