String Symmetry Program

Question

Hey I could use a little bit of help to figure out why my program isn't working. The question is to make a program using recursion that figures if it the text given is a palindrome or not after all the punctuation and white spaces are removed. While the program so far compiles, it returns every value as false. We are only allowed to change the isSymmetrical method. I could use whatever help possible trying to figure out how to make this work. Thank you.

public class StringSymmetry {

public static boolean isSymmetrical(String inputText)
{
    if(inputText.length() == 0 || inputText.length() ==1)
        return true;

    if(inputText.charAt(0) == inputText.charAt(inputText.length()-1))
        return isSymmetrical(inputText.substring(1,inputText.length()-1));

        return false;
}



public static void main(String[] args) {
    String[] sampleData = 
        { "Don't nod",
          "Dogma: I am God",
          "Too bad - I hid a boot",
          "Rats live on no evil star",
          "No trace; not one carton",
          "Was it Eliot's toilet I saw?",
          "Murder for a jar of red rum",
          "May a moody baby doom a yam?",
          "Go hang a salami; I'm a lasagna hog!",
          "Name is Bond, James Bond"
        };

    for (String s : sampleData)
    {
        System.out.println("isSymmetrical (" + s + ") returns " + isSymmetrical(s));
    }


}

}

Answer 1

The problem is that you didn't include any checks for case or punctuation and white space.

One way you could do it is something like this. The specifics depend on what you're allowed to use for the assignment, but you're probably intended to do something along these lines.

Also, note that toLowerCase is problematic if you have the default locale set to something unusual like Turkey. For proper robustness, you need to specify a locale, but this isn't something you'll have to worry about in a homework assignment.

  public static boolean isSymmetrical(String inputText)
  {
      inputText = inputText.toLowerCase();

      if(inputText.length() == 0 || inputText.length() ==1)
          return true;

      if(!Character.isLetter(inputText.charAt(0)))
        return isSymmetrical(inputText.substring(1,inputText.length()));

      if(!Character.isLetter(inputText.charAt(inputText.length()-1)))
        return isSymmetrical(inputText.substring(0,inputText.length()-1));      

      if(inputText.charAt(0) == inputText.charAt(inputText.length()-1))
          return isSymmetrical(inputText.substring(1,inputText.length()-1));

      return false;
  }

Answer 2

Check the following function:

public static boolean isPalindrome(String str, int x) {
    if(x == 0) return true;

    if(str.charAt(0) == str.charAt((str.length() - 1)))
        return isPalindrome(str.substring(1, str.length() - 1), x - 1);
    return false;
}

Explanation:

A recursive function with the following parameter's:

1. str - a String object which will be tested for symmetry.
2. x - Integer that represent's the recursive tester parameter and decides for how far you want to iterate and check for two sided symmetry.

The base case is set to zero and return's true when you finished the desired iteration number.

The second if-condition statement is used to check the corner's of the string that is given, and its return statement will recursively enter another testing loop with shorter corner's of the original String( . . . corner's will be shorter by one).