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Palindrome has always been used as an exercise in programming, and most likely students are asked to create a method and implement an iterative and recursive approach.
A Palindrome is a word, or phrase that can be read forward and in reverse. e.q ‘racecar’ ‘madam’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome
And we’re gonna do that here. We take the iterative approach first:
def palindrome(str)
reversed = ''
length = str.length
while length != 0
reversed += str[length - 1]
length -= 1
end
return false unless str == reversed
true
end
puts palindrome('kayak')
# true
puts palindrome('word')
# falseWe declare a variable reversed which will store the reversed string, and a length that will store the length of the string parameter. Since we’ll gonna use that more that once, it’s always better to store that into a variable.
Then we loop and check if the length is not equals to zero and if not, we pop the last letter of the string and store it into our reversed string, make sure to minus the length so it’ll reference the last element of the array and it won’t be out of bounds.
We now compare the two strings that we have, the original string and the reversed, and we'll return false if those two are not equals and lastly return true if everything is a palindrome.
Now let’s proceed to the recursive method:
def palindrome_recursive(str)
if str.length == 1 || str.length == 0
return true
end
if str[0] == str[-1]
palindrome_recursive(str[1..-2])
else
false
end
end
puts palindrome_recursive('civic')
# true
puts palindrome_recursive('notachance')
# puts falseIn making a recursive method we should always create a base case or also called an end goal.
And in our method we do that if the length of the parameter str is 1 or 0 and we return true.
Then we check if the first and last letter of the string by indexing str[0] and str[-1] are the same, otherwise its false, if the first and last letter are correct we call our method but this time we put str[1..-2] so it’ll check the second index and so fort.
Mostly we can achieve a solution using the iterative approach but it’s also better to know on how to use and implement a recursive function.
Here’s also a link about recursion in Ruby.
https://www.rubyguides.com/2015/08/ruby-recursion-and-memoization/