Validate Palindrome Ignoring Symbols | Dataford Interview Questions

At Stripe, you need to validate whether a user-entered string reads the same forward and backward when punctuation, spaces, and other non-alphanumeric characters are ignored. Write an algorithm that returns whether the cleaned string is a palindrome.

Formal Specification

Implement a function that takes a single string s and returns a boolean:

Input: s — a string containing letters, digits, spaces, and special characters
Output: True if the string is a palindrome after removing all non-alphanumeric characters and ignoring letter case; otherwise False

Constraints

0 <= len(s) <= 2 * 10^5
s consists of letters, digits, spaces, and printable special characters
Ignore all non-alphanumeric characters during comparison
Treat uppercase and lowercase letters as equal

Function Signature

def is_palindrome(s):

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