Chris Hyde has started a new series on palindromes in T-SQL:
Immediately I realized that this algorithm will need to accomplish two different things. I first need to remove all non-alphabetic characters from the string I am testing, because while “able was I ere I saw Elba” is palindromic even leaving the spaces intact, this will not work for other well-known palindromes such as “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” Then the second task is to check that the remaining string is the same front-to-back as it is back-to-front.
With the help of Elder’s Dead Roots Stirring album I set out to find the most efficient T-SQL code to accomplish this task. My plan was to avoid resorting to Google for the answer, but perhaps in a future post I will go back and compare my solution to the best one I can find online. For this first post in the series I will tackle only the first task of removing the non-alphabetic characters from the string.
Read on to see how Chris takes on this task.