cant add function to a variable string

[saeed_violinist]

Hi friends, my first post  here...hope you can guide me

I have defined a function to greet the visitors based on the day and the time of a day, the function works fine itself, but when I try to call it in a string in middle of a html table, the function runs before anything in the string. the code for calling function is :

[code]
<?php
include "data/inc.php";

$GreetContent = "<table border=\"1 px\"><tr><td>hello saeed, " . GreetDay() . " </td></tr></table>\n";

echo $GreetContent
?>
[/code]

If we assume that the GreetDay() outpot is something like "welcome, today is Mondey" , when I run the script the html outpot will be :

[code]
welcome, today is Monday<table border="1 px"><tr><td>hello saeed,  </td></tr></table>
[/code]

I want to know why "GreetDay()" function runs prior to "Hello saeed" and not placed in the table I defined ?

thanks!

[hitman6003]

is your function, GreetDay, returning the value "welcome, today is Monday", or is it echoing out that value?  The way that you are using it, you need to have it return a value.

[code]function GreetDay() {
  return "Welcome, today is " . date('l');
}[/code]

not:

[code]function GreetDay() {
  echo "Welcome, today is " . date('l');
}[/code]

[saeed_violinist]

Thanks a lot! I used "echo" but now with return I get the desired result.