For those of you that have chosen to upgrade to C++, one of the first things you might do is take advantage of strings.
I whipped this up for my ROM code-base that uses g++ 4.4.3. It's a small file, but it is inspired by Tyche's TeensyMud string lib.* Just add your own declarations to merc.h or you can write a strlib.h. Have fun!
* As you can see the code is original. I give Tyche credit for the isMatch() function concept, but it is obviously not the same.