PHP function return. Cheats allowed - php

Question

OK.
I have a very long and pretty complicated function.
It looks almost like this one:
<?php
function hello() {
echo 'My Function!' ?>
<ul>
<li> Blablabla </li>
<ul>
(...)
<?php } ?>
The HUGE problem here is that I'm UNABLE to echo anything.
My function HAVE to return it's contents instead of echoing or direct outputting (it has to be that way, it's a Wordpress shortcode and when I echo - the contents are getting displayed at the top of the page - ALWAYS, not in the place where I want them):
<?php
function hello() {
$output .= 'My Function!';
$output .= '<ul>';
$output .='<li> Blablabla </li>';
$output .='<ul>';
(...)
return $output;
} ?>
I hope it's easy till now.
Now, the real problems are:
I have tons of direct input code like:
?>
<div>
<span>
<p>Smth</p>
<a>smth</a>
</span>
</div>
<?php
Adding $output everywhere kills the nice paragraphs/whitespace and code is getting VERY HARD to read and understand (and all HTML elements are parts of variable now, so even my php editor is not treating them well and coloring them as PHP elements).
And another thing, I have tons of lines like this one:
<a href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/includes/php/timthumb.php?src=<?php echo $url; ?>&h=<?php if($items=="one") echo 320; elseif($items=="two") echo 230; elseif($items=="three") echo 180; elseif($items=="four") echo 130; ?>&w=<?php if($items=="one") echo 600; elseif($items=="two") echo 420; elseif($items=="three") echo 277; elseif($items=="four") echo 203; ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="link">
(yes, this is a single line)
And I have absolutely no idea how to add such lines to $output.
$output .= '<a href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/includes/php/timthumb.php?src=<?php echo $url; ?>&h=<?php if($items=="one") echo 320; elseif($items=="two") echo 230; elseif($items=="three") echo 180; elseif($items=="four") echo 130; ?>&w=<?php if($items=="one") echo 600; elseif($items=="two") echo 420; elseif($items=="three") echo 277; elseif($items=="four") echo 203; ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>" class="link"> ';
Doesn't work of course (even with \'s before ' and ").
I believe there MUST be an easier way to attach all the code to return, but how?
I've tried with ob_start(); before code and return ob_get_clean(); after, but it outputs shortcode name instead of contents.

Answer 1

Its very hard to imagine what the problem you are trying to solve here is - although I'm not familiar with wordpress. Can't you just call the function where the output is supposed to go?
You could use output buffering - use echo/print as usual but...
ob_start();
hello();
$output=ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();
But that doesn't solve the problem that you still need to send to the browser at the right place in the page - and if you can do:
print $output;
in the right place, then you can surely do:
hello();
in the same place.

Answer 2

I agree with symcbean, but this might be a more practical approach at integrating with Wordpress: if you now have a single function called hello( ) which displays HTML, you might want to consider renaming that function to hello_content( ) (or something similar) and replace the hello( ) function with the suggestion symcbean gave you:
function hello_content( ) {
echo "foo";
}
function hello( ) {
ob_start( );
hello_content( );
return ob_get_clean( );
}
That should fix your immediate issue.

Answer 3

PHP Heredoc syntax will keep things looking neat and tidy and you can return the output to a variable. As long as you don't require any constants it will work fine.
You use it in this fashion:
function bar() {
$var = <<<EOV
anything here
anything there
EOV;
return $var;
}