Palindrome Test

[perfringo]

Another way is to write function with short-circuit i.e if first non-match encountered then False is returned. Text cleaning must be performed, this is somewhat easier with built-in tools if you need to test only in english; for other languages one could define allowed letters manually (or exclude punctuation).

One way of accomplishing it (it will ignore non-ascii characters, depending on use-case it may be a problem, using 'if letter not in string.punctuation' might be an alternative):

>>> import string
>>> def palindrome_check(text):
...     cleaned = [letter.lower() for letter in text if letter in string.ascii_letters]
...     for forward, backward in zip(cleaned, cleaned[::-1]):
...         if forward != backward:
...             return False
...     return True

Of course, there is built-in function all() exactly for that purpose:

>>> import string
>>> def palindrome_check(text):
...     cleaned = [letter.lower() for letter in text if letter in string.ascii_letters]
...     return all(forward == backward for forward, backward in zip(cleaned, cleaned[::-1]))