comments_popup_link without echo?

Question

I would like to just get the HTML that comments_popup_link generates, and echo it later on. I don't see the comments_popup_link has an $echo parameter, and I don't see a get_comments_popup_link function, like there is get_the_ID, that returns HTML istead of displaying it.

I'm using WordPress 3.1.2

What can I do?

Answer 1

I found this ticket that addresses my problem exactly: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17763