Templater Variables / Instructions

[CypherSTL]

Alright.
I have a question in regards with passing variable information along to the templater.

vBulletin 4.0 Templater Rendering
$templater = vB_Template::create('awards_awardusers_bit');
$templater->register('awardusers', $awardusers);
$awarduserslist .= $templater->render();

Displays a list of users that have that award separated by a comma.

I used this to get rid of the initial comma:

$awarduserslist = substr($awarduserslist , 2)

How would I pass that string through the templater? I've tried a few different ideas I could thing of, but none of them worked.