Palindrome in strings

[JFonseka]

We have to create a simple program to detect palindromes, mine basically does that, but now we have to modify it so it ignores case and ignores punctuation.

I modified it to ignore the case by just simply turning all letters in the string to uppercase, but i'm stuck on implementing the isalpha() function to ignore punctuation marks, any help appreciated. Cheers

#include <stdio.h>
#include <ctype.h>

int isPalindrome(char s[]);
int main (void){

  char s[100];

  printf("Enter string:\n"); //MAIN FUNCTION GETS THE INPUT
  fgets(s, 100, stdin);

  isPalindrome(s);

return 0;
  }

int isPalindrome(char s[]){   //THIS FUNCTION DOES THE STRING CHECKING

  int len;
  int lo, hi;

  for(len = 0; s[len] != '\0'; len++);    //GETTING LENGTH OF STRING


    lo = 0;                                  //LO is the starting of the array
    hi = len - 2;                          //HI is the length of the array - 2.
    
    while(hi > lo){
      
      s[hi] = toupper(s[hi]);                     //CONVERSION TO UPPERCASE
      s[lo] = toupper(s[lo]);
      
      if(s[lo] != s[hi]){                                              //THE CASE FOR IF IT'S NOT A PALINDROME
        printf("Not a palindrome\n"); 
        printf("&#37;c %d %c %d\n", s[lo], lo, s[hi], hi);       //DEBUGGING CHECKS
        return 0;
      }
      hi--;
      lo++;
      printf("%c %d %c %d\n", s[lo], lo, s[hi], hi);        
    }

      printf("Yes a palindrome\n");
    return 0;
  }

[matsp]

Ignoring punctuation (and spaces?) would be a case of remvoing them from the input string - best way would probably be to use a loop to copy the string, skipping any unwanted characters such as "'.,!\"&%$() " and such. strchr can help you here. - or use "isalpha()", and if you want to support numerical palindromes combine in "isdigit" with an OR.

--
Mats

[JFonseka]

Ignoring punctuation (and spaces?) would be a case of remvoing them from the input string - best way would probably be to use a loop to copy the string, skipping any unwanted characters such as "'.,!\"&%$() " and such. strchr can help you here. - or use "isalpha()", and if you want to support numerical palindromes combine in "isdigit" with an OR.

--
Mats

So I essentially copy the string into a new string but having ignored all the punctuations and spaces then continue with the normal checking, is this what you mean?

[Salem]

Either copy to a new string, without all the punctuation, or take it into account when working out the next pair of characters to compare.

[matsp]

So I essentially copy the string into a new string but having ignored all the punctuations and spaces then continue with the normal checking, is this what you mean?

That would be my "simple" solution, yes. It's not MUCH harder to just skip over them, but at least if you do it the way you have, where you start at either end and search to the middle, you may introduce bugs when trying to deal with "skippable" characters on either side...

Also consider that the input may end up being "nothing" if you remove spaces and punctuation characters.

By the way, you may as well translate the characters to upper (or lower) case too, when you are converting them.

--
Mats