How to wrap HTML/PHP concatenation in Wordpress Function - wordpress

Question

I'm making my first basic Wordpress Theme, and trying to create a function to retrieve and display the first 6 posts, which I could use in various areas depending on the page you're on. It is very similar to this tutorial, that I found... after facing the fact it doesn't work in my theme.
Here is a simplified piece of the code (I tried several versions) :
function show_last_items() {
while ( have_posts() && $count < 6) :
the_post();
$count++;
print '<article id="post-'.the_ID().'" class="post-link-display">
<a href="'.the_permalink().'" title="'.the_title_attribute().'">
<div class="date">
<p>'.the_time( 'd/m' ).'</p>
</div>
<div class="title">
<h6>'.the_title().'</h6>
</div>
</a>
</article>';
endwhile;
}
For some reason, while the code inside the function works just fine if I use it directly on a template part (for example sidebar.php), all the HTML seems to be wiped off when used as a function... Or more exactly, it still exists, but in-between the data. So I get something like this displayed :
55http://localhost/myTheme/posts/55/my-post-title/My post title19/03My
post title
56http://localhost/myTheme/posts/56/my-other-post-title/My other post
title19/03My other post title
Yet the <article> tag and every markup in it is still there, empty, after each line that displays the retrieved information. I'd really like to understand why the concatenation doesn't work properly in this case. Is it something about the theme support ? It doesn't seem to me the WP_Widget class would change anything to this issue, but maybe I'm wrong ?

Answer 1

Try this
function show_last_items() {
while ( have_posts() && $count < 6) :
the_post();
$count++;
sprintf('<article id="post-%s" class="post-link-display">
<a href="%s" title="%s">
<div class="date">
<p>%s</p>
</div>
<div class="title">
<h6>%s</h6>
</div>
</a>
</article>', the_ID(), the_permalink(), the_title_attribute(), the_time( 'd/m' ), the_title());
}

Answer 2

Have you tried building a string and then returning it?
$return_string = '';
// while loop
$return_string .= '<article .....';
// end while
return $return_string;