How to get palindrome program to not recognize whitespace and to end with a period?

Question

I need help I have tried looking up many methods but can't seem to get it to work. I need this to not recognize white space, so if the user inputs le vel , it should say ,"Yes it is a Palindrome", just like if it was level //with no whitespace. The user input needs to end with a period and the program should not take into account the period. So level. should return true.

import java.util.Scanner;

public class PalindromeDemo
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
    String phrase, answer;
    Scanner keyboard = new Scanner(System.in);
    do
    {
        System.out.println("I will determine if a string is a palindrome");
        System.out.println("Enter a word or characters and end it with a period");
        phrase = keyboard.nextLine();

        Palindrome pd = new Palindrome();
        if(pd.checkPalindrome(phrase))

                System.out.println("YES, the phrase is palindrome!");
            else
                System.out.println("NO, the phrase is NOT palindrome.");
                System.out.println();
                System.out.println("Would you like to continue? Enter yes or no");
                answer = keyboard.nextLine();
                System.out.println();
    }
    while(answer.equalsIgnoreCase("yes"));
}
}


public class Palindrome
{
public static final int MAX_CHARS = 80;

public boolean checkPalindrome(String text)
{
    char[] array = new char[80];
    int length = text.length();

    String reverseText = "";

    for(int i = length-1; i >= 0; i--)
    {
         reverseText = reverseText + text.charAt(i);
    }

    if(reverseText.equalsIgnoreCase(text))
    {
        return true;
    }

    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}
}

Answer 1

Use this method:

public boolean checkPalindrome(String text) {
    // remove all whitespace from input word (do this FIRST)
    text = text.replaceAll("\\s+", "");

    // remove optional period from end of input word
    if (text.endsWith(".")) {
        text = text.substring(0, text.length() - 1);
    }

    char[] array = new char[80];
    int length = text.length();

    String reverseText = "";

    for (int i = length-1; i >= 0; i--) {
         reverseText = reverseText + text.charAt(i);
    }

    if (reverseText.equalsIgnoreCase(text)) {
        return true;
    }
    else {
        return false;
    }
}