Structuring control flow - searching for a word in a grid

Question

Yes this is very much a duplicate of a couple of my previous posts here but whilst responses have been useful, and though I've looked at other questions asked here regarding this particular project, I'm quite set in my way of how I'd like to do this. I'm not deliberately being stubborn but since spending a lot of time thinking about how to implement my particular algorithm, I'm finding it hard to abandon my ideas to solve the problem in other ways suggested on here. Just looking for advice on how to implement it because I'm not a great programmer and can't think how to structure the various if and for statements in my code.

So here goes. Given a 20x20 grid of letters and a given word I want to find this word in it. Can exist in any direction.

I have an index which initially is 1.

For the word I'm wanting to find in the grid, find row and column position of first letter i.e word(index).

Increment the index.

Switch among several cases to find letter in every adjacent square to each position of first letter. Have decided to do this as though going round like a compass.

            switch directions

            case 'N' 
            f_row = +1;
            f_col = 0;
            case 'NE' 
            f_row = -1; 
            f_col = +1; 
            case 'E' 
            f_row = 0; 
            f_col = +1; 
            case 'SE' 
            f_row = +1; 
            f_col = +1; 
            case 'S' 
            f_row = +1; 
            f_col = 0; 
            case 'SW' 
            f_row = +1; 
            f_col = -1; 
            case 'W' 
            f_row = 0; 
            f_col = -1; 
            case 'NW' 
            f_row = -1; 
            f_col = -1;
            end

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Check whether this letter in each of these locations in the grid is equal to word(index) which should now be the second letter.

If so move in that direction again and compare every letter for the length of the word, incrementing the word index each time.

If a character doesn't match then try other directions.

If letter isn't present try next occurrence of first word in the grid.

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I've spent hours and hours trying to get this right now with little luck and am not very good at thinking how to structure the control flow. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

        switch directions

        case 'N' 
        f_row = +1;
        f_col = 0;
        case 'NE' 
        f_row = +1; % 
        f_col = +1; 
        case 'E' 
        f_row = 0; 
        f_col = +1; 
        case 'SE' 
        f_row = -1; %
        f_col = +1; 
        case 'S' 
        f_row = +1; 
        f_col = 0; 
        case 'SW' 
        f_row = -1; %
        f_col = -1; 
        case 'W' 
        f_row = 0; 
        f_col = -1; 
        case 'NW' 
        f_row = +1; %
        f_col = -1;
        end

There are some errors in your code, the numbers did not match the compass direction. Updated rows are marked with an %