strange behavior with comment position

Question

I've created a custom content.php and removed any comments on the content.php page

then i changed the sharing-service.php from jetpack and added comments_popup_link there:

// Wrapper
$sharing_content .= '<div class="sharedaddy sd-sharing-enabled">';
$sharing_content .= '<div class="robots-nocontent sd-block sd-social sd-social-' . $global['button_style'] . ' sd-sharing">';

if ( $global['sharing_label'] != '' )
    $sharing_content .= '<h3 class="sd-title">'. comments_popup_link(  __( 'Leave a reply', 'changed2012' ) , __( '1 Reply', 'changed2012' ), __( '% Replies', 'changed2012' ) ) . $global['sharing_label'] . '</h3>';
$sharing_content .= '<div class="sd-content"><ul>';

and it looks like this:

does anyone have an idea why its getting moved there? and how i can move it back where it should be?

Answer 1

You could probably just buffer the output from comments_popup_link in a separate function.

function get_comments_popup_link( $zero = false, $one = false, $more = false, $css_class = '', $none = false ) {
    ob_start();
    comments_popup_link( $zero, $one, $more, $css_class, $none );
    return ob_get_clean();
}

Answer 2

As @Michael points out, "comments_popup_link() prints the result, and can therefore not be used in a string concatenation" when returning output. There's a patch available, or you could use following workaround, something I wrote a while ago, adapted to your markup:

if ( $global['sharing_label'] != '' ) {
    global $post;
    $comments_link_txt = ( get_comments_number( $post->ID ) != 0 ) ? sprintf( _n( '1 Reply', '%1$s Replies', get_comments_number( $post->ID ), 'changed2012' ), number_format_i18n( get_comments_number( $post->ID ) ) ) : __( 'Leave a reply', 'changed2012' );
    $sharing_content .= '<h3 class="sd-title"><a href="' . get_comments_link( $post->ID ) . '">' . $comments_link_txt . '</a>' . $global['sharing_label'] . '</h3>';
}