C++ ::  Recursive Palindrome Test With Merge Sorting

My assignment is to make a program that tests whether something is a Palindrome or not using a recursive function. Also, in order to test what type the Palindrome is (if it is indeed a palindrome) I'll need to merge sort it. Now alphabet characters, spaces, and numbers are all allowed, as long as the spaces line up with the spaces in the original input. And yes this is user inputted. I can show you what I've got so far and then I'll tell you what my problem is.

#include <iostream>
#include <istream>
#include <string>
#include <string.h>
#include <conio.h>
using namespace std;
/************To Test if Palindrome*******************/
bool IsPalindrome(char *str, int size) {
if( str[0] == str[size-1]);

[Code] .....

Now my problem is that I can't seem to get the test to work correctly. Since the word is user inputted I don't have any way of knowing the size so that kind of complicates it a little bit. The other thing is I was told by my professor that I need a boolean flag to make it work, and I need to set the value to the return of the IsPalindrome function. I'm not sure how to do that. I also don't haven't been able to add in the MergeSort yet, so the Order and Type don't really work correctly because I'm not sure how to get int len for it. (len is length)