Palindrome Detection in Python

Introduction

A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters that reads the same forward and backward. For example, "racecar" is a palindrome because when you reverse the word, it still spells "racecar". In this challenge, you will write a function that checks if a given string is a palindrome.

Palindrome

Write a function palindrome(s) that takes a string s as its only parameter and returns True if s is a palindrome and False otherwise. Your function should ignore capitalization and non-alphanumeric characters when checking for palindromes.

To solve this problem, you can follow these steps:

1. Use str.lower() to convert the string to lowercase.
2. Use re.sub() to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from the string.
3. Compare the resulting string with its reverse using slice notation.

from re import sub

def palindrome(s):
  s = sub('[\W_]', '', s.lower())
  return s == s[::-1]

palindrome('taco cat') ## True

Summary

In this challenge, you learned how to check if a given string is a palindrome. You used str.lower() and re.sub() to convert the string to lowercase and remove non-alphanumeric characters, and then compared the resulting string with its reverse using slice notation.