Check for Palindromes - How would you have done it?

Project Feedback
#1

So I’ve completed the “Check for Palindromes” exercise and my solution works. I know there are probably more elegant ways to do this and so I’m simply curious about what you folks may have done differently. This is just a learning exercise to see where I could improve.

Also I could not get the underscore to remove using regular expressions but I’m not sure why so I ended up just using .remove("_", ‘’) which worked but if someone could provide some guidance here I’d appreciate it.

function palindrome(str) {
  // Good luck!
  var newStr = str;

  //function to remove all special characters
  function replaceSpecial(str){
    newStr = str.replace(/(?!\w|\s)./g, '').replace(/\s+/g, '').replace(/^(\s*)([\W\w]*)(\b\s*$)/g, '$2').replace("_", '');
    newStr = newStr.toLowerCase();
    return newStr;
  }
  replaceSpecial(str);
  //Split new string into an array
  var strArray = newStr.split('');
  //create original check string
  var orgStr = strArray.join('');
  //Reverse the new string into an array
  var arrRev = strArray.reverse();
  //create reversed check string
  var strRev = arrRev.join('');
  //check to see if original string and reversed string are the same
  if(orgStr === strRev){
    return true;
  }
  return false;
}
#2