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Check Palindrome (Recursive) Editorial

The document describes how to check if a string is a palindrome using recursion. It explains that a palindrome is a string that is the same forward and backward. The approach is to recursively compare the first and last characters of the string, incrementing the start index and decrementing the end index until the indices meet in the middle or a mismatch is found, returning true or false accordingly. Base cases check for strings of length 0 or 1. Pseudocode provides a solve function that implements this recursively to check palindromes.

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Rohil Bansal
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39 views

Check Palindrome (Recursive) Editorial

The document describes how to check if a string is a palindrome using recursion. It explains that a palindrome is a string that is the same forward and backward. The approach is to recursively compare the first and last characters of the string, incrementing the start index and decrementing the end index until the indices meet in the middle or a mismatch is found, returning true or false accordingly. Base cases check for strings of length 0 or 1. Pseudocode provides a solve function that implements this recursively to check palindromes.

Uploaded by

Rohil Bansal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Check Palindrome (recursive)  

 
Problem Description:​ C
​ heck if a given String S is palindrome or not (using
recursion). Return true or false.
 
Sample Input: 
 
​racecar 
 
Sample Output: 
 
​true 
 
How to approach? 
 
A palindrome string is one that is the same whether it’s read left-to-right or right-to-left. 
Some examples of palindromic strings are, “malayalam”, “racecar”, “a”. One way to look 
at palindromes is that they are equal to their reverse. So, we could reverse a string and 
then compare it with itself. If they are equal, then the string is a palindrome, otherwise 
it’s not. 
 
Another way to look at them is that the first character must be the same as the last 
character, the second character must be the same as the second last character and so 
on. 
 
Programmatically speaking, the second way of looking at palindromes is better since 
we won’t have to reverse the string and store it somewhere and then compare the two 
character by character. We could just use two pointers (one from the 0​th​ index and one 
from the last index) to iterate through the string and compare the characters, we they 
are equal, we move to the next iteration, otherwise we straight-away return false. 
This is easier to do iteratively, but a little tricky to do recursively though. 
 
One thing that we can do is to create a helper function and give it three parameters; the 
string ​s​ itself, the ​start​ index and the e
​ nd​ index. Initially, the start would be 0, the end 
would be the last index of the string. Then we compare the characters at both these 
indices. If they are equal, we recurse on our function passing the same string, s ​ tart + 
1 a​ nd ​end - 1​, otherwise we can just return false and skip further checking. 
What will be the base case? Let’s look at the most trivial case. A string of length 0 or 1 is 
a palindrome. No question about it. So, how do know that we are dealing with a 0 or 1 
size string? It’s easy. The start index must be equal to the end index (for string size 1) or 
it must be greater than the end index (for string size 0). So our base case could be: 
  
if(start >= end):  
return true 
 
 
 
 
The pseudo-code for this approach is shown on the next page. 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
function solve(str: string, start: integer, end: integer): 
if(start >= end): 
return true 
if(str[start] != str[end]): 
return false 
return solve(str, start + 1, end - 1); 
   
   

function checkPalindrome(str: a string): 


return solve(str, 0, str.length() - 1); 

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