I've looked over this patch, and it seems to me that there is no compelling reason to create two new functions.  I think it would be clearer to just inline that code in the places it is used.  If it turns out later that the code needs to be reused elsewhere, it can be factored out at that time.  (Also, as it stands the methods are being made part of the public API, and that doesn't look right to me.)

Catherine, if you'd like to update the patch that would be great.  Otherwise we will hopefully get to it during the upcoming bug weekend.