title: Phing: get a filename without the extension
body: <p>Given a Phing loop such as this</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;target name="lessc"&gt;
    &lt;exec command="lessc ${absolute-filename}" logoutput="false" output="${project.basedir}/public/assets/css/libraries/${filename}" /&gt;
  &lt;/target&gt;
  
  &lt;target name="build-in-loop"&gt;
    &lt;foreach param="filename" absparam="absolute-filename" target="lessc"&gt;
      &lt;fileset dir="${project.basedir}/assets/less/libraries/"&gt;
        &lt;include name="*.less"/&gt;
      &lt;/fileset&gt;
    &lt;/foreach&gt;
  &lt;/target&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In target lessc, how can I extract the file name without extension from the variable <code>absolute-filename</code>? In the example above, the <code>output</code> file will have the extension <code>.less</code> - obviously not what I need.</p>
  
  <p>I know there is a task made for less, and that I could extend Phing to support this specific operation, but I would like to know first if Phing basically allows simple string manipulation on variables.</p>