I am attempting to remove all trailing white-space and periods from a string so that if I took either of the following examples:

```
var string = "  ..  bob is a string .";

```

or

```
var string = " .  bob is a string . ..";

```

They would end up as:

```
"bob is a string"

```

I know diddly squat about `regex` but I found a function to remove trailing white-space [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/498970/how-do-i-trim-a-string-in-javascript):

```
str.replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, "");

```

I tried modifying to include periods however it still only removes trailing white-space characters:

```
str.replace(/^[\s+\.]|[\s+\.]$/g, "");

```

Can anyone tell me how this is done and perhaps explain the regular expression used to me?