Meta Interview Problem #5 — Valid Palindrome II

Given a string S consisting of lowercase English characters, determine if you can make it a palindrome by removing at most one character.

Example:

  • tacocatstrue. tacocats → remove stacocat.
  • abaabtrue (remove the middle a).
  • baabatrue (remove one of the middle as).

Summary (approach):
Use two pointers. On the first mismatch, try skipping either the left or the right character and check if the remaining substring is a palindrome. O(n) time, O(1) space.

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