checking if the given inputted word is a palindrome or not

Question

a=raw_input("enter the word")
b=[str(letter) for letter in a]
c=b[::-1]
print c

if b==c:
    print ("it is a palindrome") 
else:
    print "it is not a palindrome"

this program works fine..just one question how do i modify it so that it prints nurses run as a palindrome. it is currently printing nursesrun as a palindrome. please help and suggest. this code is for python 2.7 and please to improvise on this code only. thanks.

Answer 1

While there are better ways of doing this, this example shows an improvement (specifically) for your code. you can check for letter.isalpha()

b = [str(letter) for letter in a if letter.isalpha()]

and now the check would work.

Demo:

>>> x = "nurses run"
>>> b=[str(letter) for letter in x if letter.isalpha()]
>>> 
>>> b
['n', 'u', 'r', 's', 'e', 's', 'r', 'u', 'n']
>>> c = b[::-1]
>>> b == c
True
>>> 

EDIT:

The code using replace:

x = x.replace(" ", "")

>>> x = "nurses run"
>>> x = x.replace(" ", "")
>>> x
'nursesrun'

Note that you would have to replace explicitly every single type this way.