[bcrosby95]

In the example code they explicitly put the struct in the c file so the char* is not available.

If you're suggesting getting around this by casting an email_t* to char* then I wish you good luck on your adventures. There's some times you gotta do stuff like that but this ain't it.

[dwattttt]

You could probably get away with the typecast if you satisfy the "common struct prefix" requirement, that's nowhere near necessary.

While the article does hide the internal char*, that's not strictly necessary to get the benefit of "parse, don't validate". Hide implementation details sure, but not everything is an implementation detail.