c++ how to remove filename from path string

On Windows use _splitpath() and on Linux use dirname()

use strrchr() to find the last backslash and strip the string.

char *pos = strrchr(pathname, '\\');
if (pos != NULL) {
   *pos = '\0'; //this will put the null terminator here. you can also copy to another string if you want
}

The easiest way is to use find_last_of member function of std::string

string s1("../somepath/somemorepath/somefile.ext");
string s2("..\\somepath\\somemorepath\\somefile.ext");
cout << s1.substr(0, s1.find_last_of("\\/")) << endl;
cout << s2.substr(0, s2.find_last_of("\\/")) << endl;

This solution works with both forward and back slashes.

On Windows 8, use PathCchRemoveFileSpec which can be found in Pathcch.h

PathCchRemoveFileSpec will remove the last element in a path, so if you pass it a directory path, the last folder will be stripped.
If you would like to avoid this, and you are unsure if a file path is a directory, use PathIsDirectory

PathCchRemoveFileSpec does not behave as expected on paths containing forwards slashes.