From: James Turner <turnerjh@XTN.NET>
Subject: Circlemud design issues

Sammy <samedi@DHC.NET> writes:
> I hate to be rude, but rather than argue till you're blue in the face that
> these are wasteful functions that would be better off replaced by a "pair
> of functions", why not show us those two functions?

One of the pair is the standard one_argument (and its variation
one_word, which I plan on incorporating into one single function).
Below is the function that I described before.  Basically, it takes a
string and breaks it up into words.  It respects single and double
quotes, though it probably needs a parameter to specify whether to
only break on whitespaces.  The macro VALID_STRING I define elsewhere
(gasp, yes a macro, the reasoning being that it is very type
independant and doesn't depend on the internals of any data
structure).  The function as-is is not thread safe; however, that can
be changed without too much work.

After split_argument is the an example of its use.  The function
itself isn't important (it is part of my quest tracking code for
autoquests, which interfaces with DG scripts).

Also, note I use send_to_charf from George's site, but only in the
do_showquests function.  The split_argument function should work on
any system, provided the defines and structure are in place.

#define VALID_STRING(s)          ((s) && *(s))
#define MAX_PARAMS              128
char split_results[MAX_PARAMS][MAX_INPUT_LENGTH];

int
split_argument(char *arg)
{
  int i, j, n;
  char stopchar;

  for (i = 0; i < MAX_PARAMS; i++)
    split_results[i][0] = 0;

  if (!VALID_STRING(arg)) return 0;

  while(*arg && isspace(*arg)) arg++;

  if (!VALID_STRING(arg)) return 0;

  n = 0;

  for(i = 0; arg[i] != 0; i++) {
    while(arg[i] && isspace(arg[i])) i++;

    if (arg[i] == '"' || arg[i] == '\'') {
      stopchar = arg[i];
      i++;
    }
    else
      stopchar = ' ';

    for (j = 0; arg[i+j] && (arg[i+j] != stopchar); j++)
      split_results[n][j] = arg[i+j];

    if (arg[i+j] == stopchar) i++;

    split_results[n][j] = 0;
    i += j;
    n++;
  }

  return n;
}

void
do_setquests(CHAR_DATA *ch, char *argument, int cmd, int subcmd)
{
  CHAR_DATA *vict;
  int n, quest, val;

  n = split_argument(argument);

  if (n < 3) {
    send_to_charf(ch, "Usage: setquests <victim> <quest number> <stage>\r\n");
    return;
  }

  vict = get_char_vis(ch, split_results[0]);
  quest = atoi(split_results[1]);
  val = atoi(split_results[2]);

  if (!vict || IS_NPC(vict)) {
    send_to_char("No such player is online.\r\n", ch);
    return;
  }

  if ((quest < 1) || (quest > NUM_QUESTS)) {
    send_to_charf(ch, "The quest number should be between 1 and %d.\r\n", NUM_Q
UESTS);
    return;
  }

  setQuestStatus(vict, quest - 1, val);

  send_to_charf(ch, "%s's quest %d now is %d.\r\n", GET_NAME(vict), quest, val)
;

}

--
James Turner               turnerjh@xtn.net
                           http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/~turnerj1/