Strings are anything in between quotation marks, not just letters.

All of the examples are strings: "Hello" ------ '909+78' ------- "??@.:;^+"

this one was actually possible but i know what you mean...

The answer is to divide by 2, if the remainder is 1, then it is odd, and if the remainder is 0, it is even

Yep. This approach in JS or PHP is much shorter. I simply translated my solution from it into Python, which works awkward with regular expression. And I believe there was a bug with random tests 4+ years ago that involved removing multiple spaces that made the code even longer =)

mostly it depends upon readability

Not a kata issue! Rankings are shared among all languages and it is guaranteed that Python is definitely
not the least 8kyu-wise language for this kata :-)

see message above.

kata hint != kata suggestion

not a kata suggestion

Meanwhile, please remember to put a spoiler tag on your comments if they contain code or a discussion of the solution methods, thanks. I have put the flag on your comment already.

here ya go