All these local routines are implemented directly in the .cc file, but it's better to implement them as private members of HieroExtractorRunner. To do so, add function declarations to the "private:" section HieroExtractorRunner's class declaration, and add HieroExtractorRunner:: before each of these function names. The reason why this is necessary is to prevent linker errors at compilation if two different .cc files implement a function of the same name.