Mirror String — Asked in Google and De Shaw Interview

Placewit
2 min readJun 14, 2021

Problem Statement :

Given a string S containing only uppercase English characters. Find whether S is the same as its reflection in the mirror.

Sample Input:

ITATI

Sample Output:

Yes

Sample Input:

MZM

Sample Output:

No

Approach :

Check Palindrome and Symmetricity

For a string to be same as its reflection in the mirror, it should satisfy the following conditions:

  1. The given string “S” needs to be a palindrome.
  2. All the characters of the string must be symmetric so that the reflection of the characters remains the same.
  • The symmetric characters are AHIMOTUVWXY.
  • Store the symmetric characters in an unordered set, traverse the string, and if the string contains any non-symmetric character, then return false.
  • If all the characters present in the string are symmetric, then check if the string is a palindrome or not. If the string is a palindrome, then return true, otherwise, return false.

Time Complexity : O(N)
Space Complexity : O(1)

Code :

Thanks for Reading

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