Palindrome sentence, how to ignore the punctuation

Question

word = input("Enter a word:")
a = word[::-1]
print (a)

if a == word:
    print ("The entered word is a palindrome.")
if a != word:
    print ("The entered word is not a palindrome.")

This is my current code to see if a word is a palindrome or not. A palindrome is a word that is written the same backwards/forwards. e.g mum and dad, hannah etc.

How would I change this so that I can use it for a phrase also? e.g a phrase could be : "Lisa Bonet ate no basil"

However, with the code I have it wouldn't recognise the sentence as a palindrome. What do I need to do to fix that?

if I used the sentence "sit on a potato pan otis" the program still says it isn't a palindrome — potatomeister, Jan 04 '16 at 17:06
You're looking at removing spaces, not punctuation, although the effect would be the same. This is a common programming problem. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8270092/python-remove-all-whitespace-in-a-string — Kinsa, Jan 04 '16 at 17:08

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 04 '16 at 17:10

Use string.punctuation:

import string
p = string.punctuation
s = "Lisa Bonet ate no basil"
word = ''.join([x for x in s.lower() if not x in p]).replace(' ','') ## 'lisabonetatenobasil'

## Your logic here

You want to remove all the whitespace (hence .replace(' ','')) and you also want to standardize case (hence .lower()) for palindromes.

Palindrome sentence, how to ignore the punctuation

1 Answers1