Standard C++ won't do much for you in this regard, since path names are platform-specific. You can manually parse the string (as in glowcoder's answer), use operating system facilities (e.g. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa364232(v=VS.85).aspx ), or probably the best approach, you can use a third-party filesystem library like boost::filesystem.
There is a standard Windows function for this, PathRemoveFileSpec. If you only support Windows 8 and later, it is highly recommended to use PathCchRemoveFileSpec instead. Among other improvements, it is no longer limited to MAX_PATH (260) characters.