Removing punctuation from the beginning and end of a string

Question

I am working on a project for a "spell checking" program. So far the StringHash class is made, and the dictionary is read into a hash table. Then the document to be checked is specified via command line, the document scans through each word and checks to see if it is in the dictionary, if it is do nothing, if it is not then display it to console. The problem I am having is with a method in the main class. The method (I will post what I have so far) is called removePunct. The method should remove any punctuation from the beginning and the end of the string, nothing from the middle. Here is what I have so far:
public static String removePunct(String word){
          StringBuilder wo = new StringBuilder(word);
          int x = (word.length()-1);
          if(!Character.isLetter(wo.charAt(0)))
               wo.deleteCharAt(0);
          if(!Character.isLetter(wo.charAt(x)))
               wo.deleteCharAt(x);
          return wo.toString();
Any help would be much appreciated, I'm pretty certain the solution is either something completely different, or something so simple that I just missed it.

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to just show you the actual file to be spell checked:
-- outline --
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What I need the spell checker to do is read each word, and strip any beginning or ending punctuation, e.g. (c) would become c. Pretty much punctuation consists of anything that is not a letter, hence the use of isLetter. I can easily modify the method to remove all punctuation using regular expressions, but I only want the beginning and end characters removed.
Example of words:
-yacc.c would become yacc.c and is not in the dictionary so it would be printed.