Palindrome Check With Rules | Dataford Interview Questions

FourKites may receive tracking labels and reference strings in inconsistent capitalization or spacing. Write a function that determines whether a given string is a palindrome after ignoring space characters and capitalization.

A palindrome reads identically from left to right and right to left after normalization. Preserve every non-space character, including punctuation, and compare letters without regard to case.

Formal Specification

Implement is_palindrome(s), where s is a string. Return True if the normalized string is a palindrome, otherwise return False.

Normalization consists of:

Ignoring ordinary space characters (' ').
Comparing alphabetic characters case-insensitively.
Keeping all other non-space characters in their original sequence.

You may use a two-pointer approach that scans inward from both ends. Do not assume the input contains only letters.

Constraints

1 <= len(s) <= 10^5
s contains printable characters
Only ordinary space characters (' ') are ignored
Punctuation and digits remain part of the comparison

Function Signature

def is_palindrome(s):

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