C Programming - Space Character Not Detected

Mainly a Java/Python coder here. I am coding a tokenizer for an assignment. (I explicitly cannot use strtok().) The code below is meant to separate the file text into lexemes (aka words and notable characters).

char inText[256];
fgets(inText, 256, inf);

char lexemes[256][256];
int x = 0;

char string[256] = "\0";
for(int i=0; inText[i] != '\0'; i++)
{
    char delims[] = " (){}";
    char token = inText[i];

    if(strstr(delims, &inText[i]) != NULL)
    {
        if(inText[i] == ' ') // <-- Problem Code
        {
            if(strlen(string) > 0)
            {
                strcpy(lexemes[x], string);
                x++;
                strcpy(string, "\0");
                (*numLex)++;
            }
        }
        else if(inText[i] == '(')
        {
            if(strlen(string) > 0)
            {
                strcpy(lexemes[x], string);
                x++;
                strcpy(string, "\0");
                (*numLex)++;
            }
            strcpy(lexemes[x], &token);
            x++;
            (*numLex)++;
        }
        else
        {
            strcpy(lexemes[x], &token);
            x++;
            (*numLex)++;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        strcat(string, (char[2]){token});
    }
}

For some odd reason, my code cannot recognize the space character as ' ', as 32, or by using isspace(). There are no error messages, and I have confirmed that the code is reaching the space in the text.

This is driving me insane. Does anyone have any idea what is happening here?

You are using the function strstr incorrectly.

if(strstr(delims, &inText[i]) != NULL)

the function searches exactly the string pointed to by the pointer expression &inText[i] in the string " (){}".

Instead you need to use another function that is strcspn.

Something like

i = strcspn( &inText[i], delims );

or you can introduce another variable like for example

size_t n = strcspn( &inText[i], delims );

depending on the logic of the processing you are going to follow.

Or more probably you need to use the function strchr like

if(strchr( delims, inText[i]) != NULL)