Palindrome Radar

Jul 10, 2025 10:29:49 AM · Last updated: 8 Jul 2025

Summary

NASA’s latest radar technology captures shape signatures of flying objects as strings of characters. As everyone knows, UFO’s are shaped like saucers and are therefore symmetrical. If a radar signal string is a Palindrome then it is symmetrical and represents a UFO. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or sequence of characters that reads the same forwards and backwards.

Your Task

Implement a function that accepts a radar signal string and if it is symmetrical in shape determines that it is a UFO, otherwise it is not. If the string is a Palindrome then it is deemed symmetrical.

Input

A string representing the radar signal for the object. Ignore spaces, punctuation and differences in letter case.

Output

Return True if the input string is a Palindrome and therefore represents a UFO signature, False otherwise.

Rules

Ignore capital letters, punctuation, and word dividers. Any character other than alphanumeric characters are classed as punctuation. Numbers in the radar signal should be treat as strings.

Examples

1. "anna" => True
2. "anna!" => True
3. "race car" => True
4. "race car1" => False
5. "Race car" => True
6. "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!" => True
7. "axDbTbd6" => False
8. "6axDbTbd6" => True
9. "Hello, World!" => False