string symbol manipulation in batch files?

Question

Is there a way to take substrings of a string with .bat/.cmd files?

For example given the string "hello.txt" is there a way to strip the .txt?

EDIT: Also is there a more general way to do this, not under the assumption that it is a file name or file path?

Answer 1

If this is a file passed as a parameter, you can use %~n1, like this:

test.bat
----------
echo %~n1 %~n2

c:\> test.bat myfile.txt my.long.file.bat
  myfile my.long.file

If you know the length of the string you can use the substring operator:

echo %variable:0,4%   =>  "test.txt" => "test"

And to get everything EXCEPT the last 4 characters:

echo %variable:~0,-4%  => "file...name.txt" => "file...name"

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