I feel I'm not fully understanding your question. It looks as though it should be trivial:
s[0]=='x' && s[1]=='y' && s[2]=='z'
This only looks at (at most) the first three characters. The generalisation for a string which is unknown at compile time would require you to replace the above with a loop:
// look for t at the start of s
for (int i=0; i<s.length(); i++)
{
if (s[i]!=t[i])
return false;
}
Look to the Boost's String Algo library, that has a number of useful functions, such as starts_with, istart_with (case insensitive), etc. If you want to use only part of boost libraries in your project, then you can use bcp utility to copy only needed files