Palindrome With Non-Alphanumerics | Dataford Interview Questions

OneTrust Privacy Management may receive user-entered text containing punctuation, spaces, and inconsistent capitalization. Given a string, determine whether it is a palindrome after removing every non-alphanumeric character and ignoring letter case.

Formal Specification

Implement is_palindrome(s), where s is a string containing ASCII letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation. Return True if the cleaned string reads identically from left to right and right to left. Return False otherwise. An empty cleaned string is considered a palindrome.

Use a two-pointer approach that compares characters from both ends without creating a separate cleaned string.

Constraints

1 <= len(s) <= 2 * 10^5
s contains ASCII letters, digits, spaces, and punctuation
Comparison is case-insensitive
Non-alphanumeric characters are ignored

Function Signature

def is_palindrome(s):

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