Function within echo problem

Question

Hi,

I have a slight problem with the echo statement outputting wrongly. Forexample when i do

echo "<div id=\"twitarea\">" . fetchtwitter($rss) . "</div>";

it displays function output but OUTSIDE of twitarea div. What is the cause of this behavior perhaps syntax?

thanks in advance

Here is the actual function

require_once('includes/magpie/rss_fetch.inc');
$rssaldelo = fetch_rss('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12341234.rss');
function fetchtwitter($rsskey){
foreach ($rsskey->items as $item) {
    $href = $item['link'];
    $title = $item['title'];
    print "<li class=\"softtwit\"><a href=" . $href . "    target=\"_blank\">$title</a></li><br>";
    } }

Answer 1

fetchtwitter() probably does an echo() of its own, instead of returning the string. The function is executed while echo prepares the whole string for output, before the string is printed.

Answer 2

Does fetchtwitter(...) write the output directly to the browser instead of returning it? Try something like:

<?php

ob_start();
fetchtwitter($rss);
$twitter = ob_get_clean();

echo "<div id=\"twitarea\">" . $twitter . "</div>";

?>

Or if you can modify the source of fetchtwitter(), get it to concatenate and return the string instead of echoing it.

Answer 3

Simply :

<?php
echo "<div id=\"twitarea\">";
fetchtwitter($rss);
echo "</div>";
?>

fetchtwitter($rss) is echoing output (it doesn't return it).

With that you don't have to modify fetchtwitter().

Answer 4

you could try delimiters maybe it helps

$twitter = fetchtwitter($rss);
ob_start();
echo <<<HTML;
<div id="twitarea">$twitter</div>
HTML;
echo ob_get_clean();

update You can modify your function like this too

require_once('includes/magpie/rss_fetch.inc');
$rssaldelo = fetch_rss('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12341234.rss');
function fetchtwitter($rsskey){ 
  $bfr =""; 
  foreach ($rsskey->items as $item){
    $href = $item['link'];
    $title = $item['title'];
    $bfr .= "<li class=\"softtwit\"><a href=" . $href . "> target=\"_blank\">$title</a></li><br>";
  } 
  return $bfr; 
}

Answer 5

In case you didn't see my comment.

Try using a return in your fetchtwitter() function rather than the echo that you have in there.