I originally had this function return both values by reference, but lots of places use different pointer types (e.g. char * and const char *) and I didn't want to add a lot of casts to deal with that, so I changed it to return the pointer. I did have to change a few variables to size_t in the later changes to cryptosoft to cope with the length being set by reference instead of returned, but that was less disruptive overall.