[I7] Pre-parsing the player's command.

Authoring Inform 7
1

So I’m trying to parse possessives again. And, as usual, discovered something I couldn’t really do.

After reading a command: if the player's command includes "[a person]", say "Whee!"

So far so good: clearly I’ve matched a person and Inform understands which person this is. However, it isn’t inclined to tell me; I can’t loop through people and match them in the same way, which kind of defeats the purpose.

So I’m wondering: at which point does it perform the match, and can the matched object be extracted? It’s possible for kinds of value, after all.

2

Draconis had a good suggestion in a previous thread for a similar problem that may be applicable. See:

https://intfiction.org/t/figuring-out-what-was-included/9159/1

3

It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t seem to allow for wholesale matching of the player’s command – which in turn is only the first part of what I want do do. This is rapidly turning into me trying to shave the yak. :frowning:

4

When you match an object, it puts it into the “noun” global variable. You can extract it from there.

5

True. At that point, though, there are limits to what you can gracefully do. My planned heuristic is as follows:

  • If the player’s command contains the pronoun “his”, look for a person being named in the player’s command before that point.
  • If there is no person mentioned, assume the “he” pronoun.
  • Replace “his” in the input with “[matched person] s”, which we can already handle using regular Understand tokens.

Something similar, albeit more complex, would be required for the “her” pronoun. I can see this method kinda sorta work, but it looks awfully chancy to me.