How I would solve the "Palindrome check" coding challenge

Given a user input, check if the word is a palindrome. That is, it reads the same if spelt backwards. Ignore any punctuations and spaces.

I have solved and explained the exact code here. But here's a list of the steps I'd take:

1. Get the user input.
2. Validate the input.
3. If valid, transform the input to remove spaces, special characters and ignore uppercase.
4. Reverse the cleaned up input by decrimentally looping through the string (an array of characters) and forming a new string with each character from the end, thus forming a reversed string.
5. Compare the original cleaned string and the reversed string.
6. Based on the result, display an appropriately styled response.