The program in the OP doesn't show both his code and the use of the reference code. I've seen far too many cases where a tiny difference is unnoticed (perhaps an extra blank, a fat-fingered character or something) that makes the difference. By calling both the reference function and the new function in the same program it's easier to confirm that the *exact* same data is passed to both.

In fact, I had that problem occur last year. For my son's Webelos troop we were working on encryption and decryption of messages. A similar mistake I made caused a problem, and we could decrypt only half of the message I had prepared.