That's basically chop, right? If you're longing for a chop method, why not write your own StringUtils library and include it in your projects until you find a suitable, more generic replacement?
If you want just to remove the last character use .dropRight(1). Alternatively, if you want to remove a specific ending character you may want to use a match pattern as
val s: String = "hello!"
val sClean: String = s.takeRight(1) match {
case "!" => s.dropRight(1)
case _ => s
}