checking a palindrome sentance

Hi got a method to check if a string is a palindrome but not including spaces or punctuation for example:

"a,s dfdsa"

would be a palindrome. What I'm confused with is there a decent way in java to get rid of these spaces/punctuation? or is there something else that needs to be done?

The code I got so far would only work on something like "asdfdsa". (A string with no spaces or punctuation.
Heres my current code:

int strLeft = 0;
int strRight = str.length() -1;

while (strLeft < strRight) {
if (str.charAt(strLeft) != str.charAt(strRight)) {
return false;
}
strLeft++;
strRight--;
}

return true;


Thanks in advance

replace all spaces or punctuations in the string in your first/second line.
e.g. with regex -> str = str.replaceAll("\\W|_", "");
that will replace all non-word characters (all those not matching [a-zA-Z or 0-9])

other tip: your palindrom test fails if you have upper case letters mixed with lower case letters in your string...do you like that? if not, you could use e.g. Character.toLowerCase(str.charAt(strLeft)) != ....

Thanks I forgot to consider the lower/uppercase would cause a problem. Got the method to work now, thanks for the help.