string parser text adventure - c++

Question

Hello! I am currently working on a text adventure in C++ and could use some help.
What I'm trying to do is let the user input a command like the following:
'go kitchen'
'open door with key'
and make the game react accordingly.
Our teacher gave us the following code (which I have modified) and I'm having difficulty understanding what exactly it is doing and how I can use it to make the game. I modified it so that the user can input strings and it does tokenize the string wonderfully into a verb, object, preposition and object2.
But what I need to do then is somehow compare the input to a list of available commands. This is what I'm having trouble accomplishing at the moment. I am new to programming and need to do this as a homework assignment for my studies. Any help would be much appreciated.
struct command {
char* verb;
char* object;
char* preposition;
char* object2;
};
bool getTokens(char * acInput,
const char token_delimiter,
command * pTargetCommand)
{
char * pCurToken;
pCurToken = strtok (acInput, &token_delimiter);
if (pCurToken == NULL) {
printf("Error: Found no verb");
getchar();
return 1;
}
pTargetCommand->verb = pCurToken;
pCurToken = strtok (NULL, &token_delimiter);
if (pCurToken == NULL) {
printf("Error: Found no object");
getchar();
return 1;
}
pTargetCommand->object = pCurToken;
pCurToken = strtok (NULL, &token_delimiter);
if (pCurToken != NULL) {
pTargetCommand->preposition = pCurToken;
pCurToken = strtok (NULL, &token_delimiter);
if (pCurToken == NULL) {
printf("Error: Found no second object for preposition");
getchar();
return 1;
}
pTargetCommand->object2 = pCurToken;
}
pCurToken = strtok (NULL, &token_delimiter);
if (pCurToken != NULL) {
printf("Error: too many tokens.");
getchar();
return 1;
}
}
int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
char acInput[256];
cin.getline (acInput,256);
command myCommand = { NULL };
int RoomChoice = 0;
printf ("Splitting string \"%s\" into tokens:\n", acInput);
getTokens(acInput, *TOKEN_DELIMITER, &myCommand);
printf ("Verb: %s\n", myCommand.verb);
printf ("object: %s\n", myCommand.object);
printf ("preposition: %s\n", myCommand.preposition);
printf ("object2: %s\n", myCommand.object2);
getchar();
return 0;
}

Answer 1

Without giving too much of your homework assignment away, you'll need to somehow read the list of all available actions into a structure, then compare against that structure.
As a hint, depending on the pattern, that might be a switch() {} statement or a collection like an array.
Consider
switch (myCommand.verb)
Case "go":
In a real-world application, you'd spin up a factory of command objects, then invoke one of those. Here, however, I would suggesting thinking through your control statements.

Answer 2

You cannot do a switch with strings (as you already noted, switch only work with constant numbers)
To do compare strings you can use strcmp, strncmp, or better yet, use String.compare. You should be able to find enough information about them with a Google search.