---
title: String is anagram
tags: string
cover: digital-nomad-8
firstSeen: 2018-10-01T13:17:29+03:00
lastUpdated: 2020-11-02T19:28:05+02:00
---

Checks if a string is an anagram of another string (case-insensitive, ignores spaces, punctuation and special characters).

- Use `str.isalnum()` to filter out non-alphanumeric characters, `str.lower()` to transform each character to lowercase.
- Use `collections.Counter` to count the resulting characters for each string and compare the results.

```py
from collections import Counter

def is_anagram(s1, s2):
  return Counter(
    c.lower() for c in s1 if c.isalnum()
  ) == Counter(
    c.lower() for c in s2 if c.isalnum()
  )
```

```py
is_anagram('#anagram', 'Nag a ram!')  # True
```