title: How to determine if user input is equal to specified characters MIPS
body: <p>I am trying to get input from a user in form of a string in MIPS.</p>
  
  <p>There are two things I want this to do getting input, error checking for if the string is not equal to what I want.</p>
  
  <p>Essentially what my idea here is that I want to grab the input and then check to see if the input is equal to any of the letters from A-P. If it is not equal to those, If it is not equal I want to have it loop until the user enters a value that is equal to these</p>
  
  <p>Things that I have tried to consider using are beq or Branch if equal to. I cannot figure out how I would go about using this for comparing strings vs ints like you would traditionally.</p>
  
  <p>Below is the code that I am trying to implement, this is obviously not right. But I wanted to give you guys an opportunity to see what I am trying to do so you can possibly give me some kind of direction to head towards solving this issue.</p>
  
  <pre><code>getGridInput
  
      li $v0, 8 #This read input for string
      la $a0, getGridPrompt
      syscall
  
      #if input is not equal to a-p, then jal getGridInput
      beq   $a0, "a",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "b",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "c",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "d",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "e",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "f",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "g",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "h",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "i",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "j",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "k",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "l",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "m",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "n",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "o",  getCellInput
      beq   $a0, "p",  getCellInput
  
      jal gelGridInput
  </code></pre>