How to deal with white spaces?

I'm writing a little code just for fun, but I ran into a problem. The input is meant to ask the user what they would like to do, and the valid responses involve things such as 'PICK UP BOOK', 'OPEN DOOR', etc., which would then display the appropriate remark.

 action_1 = input('What will you do?','s');

 if action_1 == OPEN DOOR

   display('stuff goes here')

Now you can see the problem, which is that I can't have white spaces in there. Is there a workaround for this, or would I have to separate the actions into parts that are more simple?

Answer 1

[Thorsten]

 if strcmp(action1, 'OPEN DOOR')
   display('stuff goes here')
 end

[Aaron Zorzi]

Thanks!