Java String Exercise

I am working on an exercise in JAVA 1.8 that goes like this.
I have a String : "Able was I, ere I saw Elba."
I need to remove spaces and punctuation and capitalize it all.
Then I need to save a copy of it in reverse order and compare the two to see if they are the same.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how they might achieve this ?
I was thinking along the lines of a regex /[a-zA-Z]+/g    as a possibility. But I don't know how to extract the words using a RegEx.
The result of the extraction would have the above expression returned as "ABLEWASIEREISAWELBA" .

Thanks,

Dave