Trim only trailing whitespace from end of string in Swift 3

This short Swift 3 extension of string uses the .anchored and .backwards option of rangeOfCharacter and then calls itself recursively if it needs to loop. Because the compiler is expecting a CharacterSet as the parameter, you can just supply the static when calling, e.g. "1234 ".trailing(.whitespaces) will return "1234". (I've not done timings, but would expect faster than regex.)

extension String {
    func trailingTrim(_ characterSet : CharacterSet) -> String {
        if let range = rangeOfCharacter(from: characterSet, options: [.anchored, .backwards]) {
            return self.substring(to: range.lowerBound).trailingTrim(characterSet)
        }
        return self
    }
}

In Swift 4 & Swift 5

This code will also remove trailing new lines. It works based on a Character struct's method .isWhitespace

var trailingSpacesTrimmed: String {
    var newString = self

    while newString.last?.isWhitespace == true {
        newString = String(newString.dropLast())
    }

    return newString
}

With regular expressions:

let string = "    example  "
let trimmed = string.replacingOccurrences(of: "\\s+$", with: "", options: .regularExpression)
print(">" + trimmed + "<")
// >    example<

\s+ matches one or more whitespace characters, and $ matches the end of the string.