Compare user-inputted string/character to another string/character - string

Question

So I'm a bit of a beginner to ARM Assembly (assembly in general, too). Right now I'm writing a program and one of the biggest parts of it is that the user will need to type in a letter, and then I will compare that letter to some other pre-inputted letter to see if the user typed the same thing.
For instance, in my code I have
.balign 4 /* Forces the next data declaration to be on a 4 byte segment */
dime: .asciz "D\n"
at the top of the file and
addr_dime : .word dime
at the bottom of the file.
Also, based on what I've been reading online I put
.balign 4
inputChoice: .asciz "%d"
at the top of the file, and put
inputVal : .word 0
at the bottom of the file.
Near the middle of the file (just trust me that there is something wrong with this standalone code, and the rest of the file doesn't matter in this context) I have this block of code:
ldr r3, addr_dime
ldr r2, addr_inputChoice
cmp r2, r3 /*See if the user entered D*/
addeq r5, r5, #10 /*add 10 to the total if so*/
Which I THINK should load "D" into r3, load whatever String or character the user inputted into r2, and then add 10 to r5 if they are the same.
For some reason this doesn't work, and the r5, r5, #10 code only works if addne comes before it.

Answer 1

addr_dime : .word dime is poitlessly over-complicated. The address is already a link-time constant. Storing the address in memory (at another location which has its own address) doesn't help you at all, it just adds another layer of indirection. (Which is actually the source of your problem.)
Anyway, cmp doesn't dereference its register operands, so you're comparing pointers. If you single-step with a debugger, you'll see that the values in registers are pointers.
To load the single byte at dime, zero-extended into r3, do
ldrb r3, dime
Using ldr to do a 32-bit load would also get the \n byte, and a 32-bit comparison would have to match that too for eq to be true.
But this can only work if dime is close enough for a PC-relative addressing mode to fit; like most RISC machines, ARM can't use arbitrary absolute addresses because the instruction-width is fixed.
For the constant, the easiest way to avoid that is not to store it in memory in the first place. Use .equ dime, 'D' to define a numeric constant, then you can use
cmp r2, dime # compare with immediate operand
Or ldr r3, =dime to ask the assembler to get the constant into a register for you. You can do this with addresses, so you could do
ldr r2, =inputVal # r2 = &inputVal
ldrb r2, [r2] # load first byte of inputVal
This is the generic way to handle loading from static data that might be too far away for a PC-relative addressing mode.
You could avoid that by using a stack address (sub sp, #16 / mov r5, sp or something). Then you already have the address in a register.
This is exactly what a C compiler does:
char dime[4] = "D\n";
char input[4] = "xyz";
int foo(int start) {
if (dime[0] == input[0])
start += 10;
return start;
}
From ARM32 gcc6.3 on the Godbolt compiler explorer:
foo:
ldr r3, .L4 # load a pointer to the data section at dime / input
ldrb r2, [r3]
ldrb r3, [r3, #4]
cmp r2, r3
addeq r0, r0, #10
bx lr
.L4:
# gcc greated this "literal pool" next to the code
# holding a pointer it can use to access the data section,
# wherever the linker ends up putting it.
.word .LANCHOR0
.section .data
.p2align 2
### These are in a different section, near each other.
### On Godbolt, click the .text button to see full assembler directives.
.LANCHOR0: # actually defined with a .set directive, but same difference.
dime:
.ascii "D\012\000"
input:
.ascii "xyz\000"
Try changing the C to compare with a literal character instead of a global the compiler can't optimize into a constant, and see what you get.