Palindrome With a Twist | Dataford Interview Questions

UKG Ready may need to validate short employee-facing message tokens that contain inconsistent capitalization, spaces, and punctuation. Given a string, determine whether it can become a palindrome after ignoring non-alphanumeric characters, ignoring letter case, and deleting at most one alphanumeric character.

A deletion is optional, and only one normalized character may be removed. Return True if the normalized string already is a palindrome or can become one with one deletion. Otherwise, return False.

Formal Specification

Implement valid_near_palindrome(s), where s is a string. Return a boolean.

Normalization keeps only alphanumeric characters and converts letters to lowercase. The result is valid if it reads identically from left to right and right to left, either before deletion or after removing at most one normalized character.

Constraints

1 <= len(s) <= 10^5
s contains printable ASCII characters
Normalization keeps letters and digits and ignores all other characters
At most one normalized character may be deleted

Function Signature

def valid_near_palindrome(s):

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