No; the C function is just a plain C function that happens to be defined inside your .m file, but it's not actually "part" of the object (class). It just happens to be stuck sitting there in the same file.
You could pass the object (self
in the caller) in as an argument to the function, and then call methods on it.
But you should probably just make it into a normal instance method. You've defined it as static
, which means it has no visibility outside of the file. If that's the case, then why not make it a method?
(There may be a small number of good cases for using utility C functions that are used only within a single class implementation, but they're pretty rare and typically around serious performance optimization.)