Important Notice:

Practice-It will be discontinued as of November 1st, 2024. After this date, the website will remain online for a transitional period, but login will be restricted to University of Washington NetID authentication. This marks the next phase towards the platform's full retirement. Thank you for your use and support of the application over the years.

If you are looking for an alternative, a similar tool, CodeStepByStep, was developed independently by the original author of Practice-It, and is available at codestepbystep.com**

logo Practice-It logo

Main Page → Problems → Solve a Problem

BJP3 Exercise 12.12: isReverse

Language/Type: Java recursion recursive programming
Author: Marty Stepp (on 2013/04/01)

Write a recursive method isReverse that accepts two strings as a parameter and returns true if the two strings contain the same sequence of characters as each other but in the opposite order (ignoring capitalization), and false otherwise. For example, the string "hello" backwards is "olleh", so a call of isReverse("hello", "olleh") would return true. Since the method is case-insensitive, you would also get a true result from a call of isReverse("Hello", "oLLEh"). The empty string, as well as any one-letter string, is considered to be its own reverse. The string could contain characters other than letters, such as numbers, spaces, or other punctuation; you should treat these like any other character. The key aspect is that the first string has the same sequence of characters as the second string, but in the opposite order, ignoring case. The table below shows more examples:

Call Value Returned
isReverse("CSE143", "341esc") true
isReverse("Madam", "MaDAm") true
isReverse("Q", "Q") true
isReverse("", "") true
isReverse("e via n", "N aIv E") true
isReverse("Go! Go", "OG !OG") true
isReverse("Obama", "McCain") false
isReverse("banana", "nanaba") false
isReverse("hello!!", "olleh") false
isReverse("", "x") false
isReverse("madam I", "i m adam") false
isReverse("ok", "oko") false

You may assume that the strings passed are not null. You are not allowed to construct any structured objects other than Strings (no array, List, Scanner, etc.) and you may not use any loops to solve this problem; you must use recursion. If you like, you may declare other methods to help you solve this problem, subject to the previous rules.

Type your solution here:


This is a method problem. Write a Java method as described. Do not write a complete program or class; just the method(s) above.

You must log in before you can solve this problem.


Log In

If you do not understand how to solve a problem or why your solution doesn't work, please contact your TA or instructor.
If something seems wrong with the site (errors, slow performance, incorrect problems/tests, etc.), please

Is there a problem? Contact a site administrator.