How to check for palindrome, ignoring special characters and case?

Question

I have a palindrome: 'Mr. Owl ate my metal worm'

Below is my code giving me output as False.

def is_palindrome(value):
    lower = value.lower()
    return value == value[::-1]

print(is_palindrome(input('Enter the value: ')))

How can I improve my code, making it ignore case, spaces, and special characters, to identify the above palindrome and give the output as True?

Answer 1

I found that there are a few issues in your code.

• First, you assigned value.lower() to lower but you did not use lower.
• Second, you have to process special characters and spaces to consider only normal characters for Palindrome.

I edited your code so that it returns True, as follows:

def is_palindrome(value):
    value = ''.join(value.split())
    value = value.replace('.', '')
    value = value.lower()
    return value == value[::-1] # mrowlatemymetalworm

print(is_palindrome(input('Enter the value: ')))