A man, a plan, a canal. Panama!

<update>  I didn't realize that my “for“ loop was garbled by .Text:  line 20 should read as for (int i=0;i<halfwayMark;i++)  < /update>

The folks over at channel9 recently did a whiteboard session (simulating an interview technique used at Microsoft to screen candidates) whereby the “candidate” was asked to whiteboard an algorithm to determine if a string was a palindrome.  While I don't know C/C++, I decided to give it a shot in managed code (C# in this case).  I also wanted to take a different approach rather than dealing with traversing the string with multiple loops.  Here is what I hacked together:

1static private bool isPalindrome (string stringToTest)
2{
3 char[] stringChars = stringToTest.ToCharArray();
4
5 // format the string
6 foreach (char character in stringChars)
7 {
8   if (char.IsPunctuation(character) || char.IsSeparator(character))
9   {
10     stringToTest = stringToTest.Replace(character.ToString(), "").ToLower();
11   }
12 }
13
14 int halfwayMark = (stringToTest.Length/2);
15 char[] firstHalf = stringToTest.Substring(0, halfwayMark).ToCharArray();
16 char[] secondHalf = stringToTest.Substring(halfwayMark).ToCharArray();
17
18 Array.Reverse(secondHalf);
19
20 for (int i=0;i