There's two basic ways of defining iterators in C to remove some pain points. (There's others, but these two common patterns crop up often enough.) void fo

There's two basic ways of defining iterators in C to remove some pain points. (There's others, but these two common patterns crop up often enough.) void foreach(TYPE* o, void(*f)(TYPE, void*), void* f_state) Which you would use like: static void sum_bytes(wchar_t c, void* state) { *((size_t*) state) += c; } size_t sum = 0; foreach(jstr, sum_bytes, (void*)&sum); An iterator that runs some function repeatedly against each element of the object, with the ability to pass in some kind of state. Tiny bit more advanced than the more common: size_t first(TYPE* o) { return 0; } size_t end(TYPE* o, size_t position) { return position >= len(o); } size_t next(TYPE* o, size_t position) { return position + 1; } Which you would use like: for(size_t i = first(o); !end(o, i); i = next(o, i)) { } Hiding your indexing ideas inside abstractions that you can write once, and use continually, removes some cognitive load, and means that when you find your pesky off-by-one error, it's only in one place, not a half-dozen nearly-matching-but-not-quite patterns.