Given two strings of equal length, determine if it's possible to form a palindrome by cutting them in half.
Question Explain
This Algorithms-based question is asking you to determine if two given strings of equal length can be cut in half to form a palindrome. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequences of characters that read the same forward and backward, such as 'madam' or 'abba'. The question is framed in such a way that you need to cut the given strings in half, and then put together the halves in a way that forms a palindrome.
To answer the question, there are a few key points you need to consider:
-
Equal Length: The strings are of equal length, so it's possible to divide them exactly in the middle.
-
Forming Palindrome: It's important to remember how a palindrome is formed: it reads the same from left to right as it does from right to left. So, you'll need to ensure that the two halves of the strings, when put together, form a word or sequence of characters that satisfy this property.
Answer Example 1
To illustrate the case better, consider an example where two strings: abc
and cba
. The strings are of equal length and they are each other's mirror image.
When you cut the strings in half and combine them, you get: ab
+ c
+ ba
, which gives abcba
which is a palindrome.
This indicates that in this particular case, it's possible to form a palindrome by cutting the strings in half.
Answer Example 2
Let's consider another example where the two strings are laval
and avall
.
If you split both strings into lava
and l
for string one, and aval
and l
for string two, you can see that the second half of both strings is the same (l
), and the first half of the string forms a palindrome (laval
).
When you combine the two halves, the resultant string is indeed a palindrome. This shows that it is possible to form a palindrome with two strings of equal length by cutting them in half.
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