Your question is Coding Challenge: Palindrome. Start with the requirements on the right.
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Medtronic CareLink may display alert or status text containing spaces, punctuation, and mixed capitalization. Write a function that determines whether the meaningful characters form a palindrome.
A string is a palindrome if it reads identically from left to right and right to left after converting letters to lowercase and ignoring every non-alphanumeric character.
Implement is_palindrome(s), where s is a string. Return True if the normalized string is a palindrome, otherwise return False. Normalization must preserve digits, compare letters case-insensitively, and ignore spaces, punctuation, and other non-alphanumeric characters.
Use a two-pointer approach that scans inward from both ends. Avoid constructing a separate normalized string.
def is_palindrome(s):