Is it possible to strip excess input off for suppression?

Hi,

thanks to the limit of characters in the title box … here’s what I mean:

When I define a verb, say SHOUT, as something new (because I want my character to not use the default shouting of Inform 7) as:

Shouting is an action applying to nothing.
Understand "Shout", "shout for help", "Help Me" as shouting.

The problems arise as soon as the player starts typing extra stuff. Like “shout at the car”. In this case the game prints out a strange message like “I only understood you as far as wanting to shout.”

I tried to create a second command called ShoutAbouting which applied to one thing. But that made matters worse - in case something didn’d exist it would now say that the thing could not be seen and if it was a generic term it would even say “What do you mean? The red car or the blue car?”. Until you got “the garage is not in reach” when answering blue car.

So what I am looking for is a way to tell Inform that everything after the Shout is to be considered as mere decoration to should be discarded - but I do not know if that is (a) possible and after looking through the manual and many examples I haven’t found anything in that regard.

Or - phrased differently - what do I have to do to have:

“Shout " be treated like “Shout” without any error messages or weird interpretations regarding the "” part.

You can make an action apply to a topic

understand the command "shout" as something new.

Shouting is an action applying to one topic.

Understand "Shout", "Shout [text]", "Help Me" as shouting.

Report shouting:
	say "You Shout!"

In my test run I get this kind of output:

Hallway

>shout
You Shout!

>shout at myself
You Shout!

>w

Left Wing
You can see Old Man here.

>shout at old man
You Shout!

>Shout about the deadful state of my hamster's love life!!!!
You Shout!

Topic … the magic word, probably. I tried something or anything but that kind of means an object and thus the clarification questions from Inform. I’ll try topic - sound very promising.

Edit: Yep, that does it! Thanks - I was trying [text] as well but didn’t know about topic so I was getting error messages that my “Understand” was not compatible with the definition. Now it is. Woot.

Fantastic!