Creating a recursive method for Palindrome

Question

I am trying to create a Palindrome program using recursion within Java but I am stuck, this is what I have so far:

 public static void main (String[] args){
 System.out.println(isPalindrome("noon"));
 System.out.println(isPalindrome("Madam I'm Adam"));
 System.out.println(isPalindrome("A man, a plan, a canal, Panama"));
 System.out.println(isPalindrome("A Toyota"));
 System.out.println(isPalindrome("Not a Palindrome"));
 System.out.println(isPalindrome("asdfghfdsa"));
}

public static boolean isPalindrome(String in){
 if(in.equals(" ") || in.length() == 1 ) return true;
 in= in.toUpperCase();
 if(Character.isLetter(in.charAt(0))
}

public static boolean isPalindromeHelper(String in){
 if(in.equals("") || in.length()==1){
  return true;
  }
 }
}

Can anyone supply a solution to my problem?

Answer 1

Here is a recursive method that will ignore specified characters:

public static boolean isPal(String rest, String ignore) {
    int rLen = rest.length();
    if (rLen < 2)
        return true;
    char first = rest.charAt(0)
    char last = rest.charAt(rLen-1);
    boolean skip = ignore.indexOf(first) != -1 || ignore.indexOf(last) != -1;
    return skip || first == last && isPal(rest.substring(1, rLen-1), ignore);
}

Use it like this:

isPal("Madam I'm Adam".toLowerCase(), " ,'");
isPal("A man, a plan, a canal, Panama".toLowerCase(), " ,'");

It does not make sense to include case insensitivity in the recursive method since it only needs to be done once, unless you are not allowed to use the .toLowerCase() method.

Answer 2

I think, recursion isn't the best way to solve this problem, but one recursive way I see here is shown below:

String str = prepareString(originalString); //make upper case, remove some characters 
isPalindrome(str);

public boolean isPalindrome(String str) {
   return str.length() == 1 || isPalindrome(str, 0);
}

private boolean isPalindrome(String str, int i) {
       if (i > str.length / 2) {
      return true;
   }
   if (!str.charAt(i).equals(str.charAt(str.length() - 1 - i))) {
      return false;
   }
   return isPalindrome(str, i+1);
}

Answer 3

public static boolean isPalindrome(String p)
    {
        if(p.length() == 0 || p.length() == 1)
            // if length =0 OR 1 then it is
            return true; 

         if(p.substring(0,1).equalsIgnoreCase(p.substring(p.length()-1))) 
            return isPalindrome(p.substring(1, p.length()-1));


        return false;
    }

This solution is not case sensitive. Hence, for example, if you have the following word : "adinida", then you will get true if you do "Adninida" or "adninida" or "adinidA", which is what we want.

I like @JigarJoshi answer, but the only problem with his approach is that it will give you false for words which contains caps.