Determine if text is palindromic

Description

Write a program that asks the user for one or more sentences and then lets the user know if it is a palindrome.

Objectives

Learning Objectives

After completing this assignment, you should understand:

• Manipulating strings
• How strings are related to lists
• Recursion

Performance Objectives

After completing this assignment, you should be able to:

• Strip characters out of strings
• Change the case of strings
• Look at substrings

Details

Deliverables

• A GitHub repo called palindrome containing at least:
  • This README.md file
  • a file called palindrome.py

Requirements

• Your program must pass the test script test.sh. To run this script, run brew install roundup first.
• Your program must output what it is doing at each step.
• Your program must use a recursive function.

Normal Mode

You have to write a program that, when run, asks the user to input some text. It can be a phrase, a sentence, or multiple sentences. After it is entered, your program will let the user know if it is a palindrome or not. Use "is a palindrome" and "is not a palindrome" in your output in order for the tests to pass.

Letter casing and punctuation do not matter when testing a palindrome. All of the following are valid palindromes:

• stunt nuts
• Lisa Bonet ate no basil.
• A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal: Panama!
• Doc, note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.

Hard Mode

Make both an iterative and recursive version of your palindrome test function.

Notes

You may want to use the re.sub function to strip out punctuation and spaces. A regular expression you can use to match all space and punctuation is r'[^A-Za-z]'.

Additional Resources

• Palindrome list.
• String type in Python.
• Regular expression operations.