Hey all, new to the board and new to Cpp.

I'm having a build error that has me stumped.
What I am trying to do is write a header function that requests a date in MM/DD/YYYY format and returns three ints to the caller. But I get an error than I can't figure out in these lines:

Code:
        iii=0; for (i=3; i<5; i++) {ii=i-1;
            if (date_c[ii] !(<"0" || >"9")) {dd_c[iii]=date_c[ii]; iii++;} else {error=1;}}

        ii=i; if (date_c[ii] !("/" || "-")) {error=1;}
The error is "Expected ` ) ' before ' ! ' token". Note the " ` ".

All of my braces, brackets, and parantheses seem to be in order.

Date_c and dd_c are declared as char *date_c, etc. I tried including <string> and declaring them as strings, but that caused problems.

Can anyone see what I cannot?
TIA