Associate Software Engineer

Step 1: Preprocessing the String

I began by addressing the requirement to ignore spaces, punctuation, and capitalization. To do this, I needed to preprocess the string. I removed all non-alphanumeric characters and converted the remaining characters to lowercase. This ensured that comparisons were made only between relevant characters.

Step 2: Checking for Palindrome

With the preprocessed string ready, the next step was to check if it was a palindrome. A straightforward approach was to compare the string with its reverse.

Step 3: Full Solution Implementation

Combining both steps, I implemented the full solution. Here is the complete function along with an example of usage:

Step 1: Understand the Problem and Plan the Approach

To solve this problem, I decided to use a sliding window approach with two pointers. The idea is to maintain a window that contains no repeating characters and move the window across the string to find the longest such substring.

Step 2: Implement the Sliding Window Technique

I used a set to keep track of characters in the current window and two pointers, left and right, to denote the boundaries of the window. I moved the right pointer to expand the window and added characters to the set. If a duplicate character was found, I moved the left pointer to shrink the window until no duplicates remained.

Step 3: Test the Solution

I tested the function with different input strings to ensure it worked correctly.