Use of antispambot with $curauth->email

Question

This is probably pretty simple, but...

I want to use the WP function antispambot not on get_the_author_email but on a value in a field I added to User Profile called publicemail. Everything I've tried throws a php error.

This is the antispambot usage shown in the WP docs:

echo antispambot(get_the_author_email());

And this is the complete function I'd like to get to work with antispambot and have it encode publicemail:

<?php
if ( !empty( $curauth->publicemail )){
echo 'Email &nbsp; <a href="mailto:' .$curauth->publicemail.' ?subject=Webmail">
<img src="' . get_bloginfo('template_url') . '/images/email_16.png"></a>'; }
?>

Answer 1

As the Codex states for the antispambot() function:

Return Values (string) Converted email address.

You have to do one of the following:

echo antispambot( $curauth->publicemail );
// OR...
print antispambot( $curauth->publicemail );

So your full example would look like the following:

if ( ! empty( $curauth->publicemail ) )
{
    echo 'Email <a href="mailto:'.antispambot( $curauth->publicemail ).'?subject=Webmail">
    <img src="'.get_bloginfo('template_url').'/images/email_16.png"></a>'; 
}

About the difference between echo, print and (just) return

1. echo and print are just synonyms/alias for each other and actually display something on the screen. The only difference in usage is, that you can't use echo in combination with return.
2. return just gives something back as a functions output. In combination with print, a function can actually display something in a template, etc.