[kh99]

Yeah, what I posted was just a "stand alone" php program, in vBulletin you usually don't want to use echo because vBulletin works by collecting up the output in a string then echoing it at the end, so if you call echo before that, whatever you echo will come out first. But the echo doesn't have anything to do with how the expression is evaluated, I just used it to output a string in the test program.

I guess maybe your problem is because the result of your string concatenation is an expression that is being eval'd later. I don't know how to fix it without understanding more of what's going on. Maybe someone else does.