Non alphabetical palindrome

Am I right in thinking that
(โ€œ0_0 (: /-\ :slight_smile: 0-0โ€)

is not a palindrome? The character between the first two zeros is an underline โ€œ_โ€. The character between the last two zeros is a dash โ€œ-โ€. Donโ€™t the those two characters need to be identical to satisfy the palindrome requirement?

The editor is turning the : + ) characters into a smiley face, by the way, and I donโ€™t know how to prevent this.

Note
Youโ€™ll need to remove all non-alphanumeric characters (punctuation, spaces and symbols) and turn everything lower case in order to check for palindromes.

understood. but the term above (but not with an emoticon) is given in the FCC challenge.

I think I know what youโ€™re saying. The code should make everything lower case, which will eliminate the difference.

Tricky.

Thank you.