Newbie asks, how to get rid of the last four characters of a string?

[Christopher Culver]

I'm somewhat new to Python and have run into this problem: I have a script
whose first argument takes a MS Word file, which would end with .doc. I
want to remove ".doc" and have just the file name without extension. Now,
I know I can do this with regular expressions, but is there a function
that can be used to chomp off the last four characters without having to
import the re module?

Christopher Culver <christopher_culver at yahoo.com>