How to output number of comments with link to comments

Question

If there are comments, I want to wrap the amount eg "5 comments" in the link to the comments section of the post, but when I add the echo for comments_link it errors.

<?php comments_number( 
'', 
'<span class="comment_meta">With:</span> 1 Comment', 
'<span class="comment_meta">With:</span> <a href="'echo . $comments_link(); . '">% Comments</a>' ); 
?>

Think I'm having trouble dipping in and out of php and html. Any help would be very much appreciated.

==== EDIT ====

Not sure if get_comment_count is still used but I've got it working using the below:

<?php $comment_count = get_comment_count($post->ID); ?>
<?php if ($comment_count['approved'] > 0) : ?><span class="comment_meta">With: </span><?php comments_popup_link( 
'', // No comments exist, you would probably want to display a link here in order for people to add the first comment
'1 comment', // 1 comment, usually phrased differently
'% comments' // > 1 comment
); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Answer 1

The problem is that you are echoing inside a string concatenation. Think of echo as something that will always begin on a new line. In most cases it's wisest to perform any calculations or string concatenations and store the result in a variable, and then call echo $var; on the following line.

In this particular case though we are dealing with a WordPress core function (comments_popup_link()) that does the echoing for us. This will probably work:

<span class="comment_meta">With: </span><?php comments_popup_link(
    '', // No comments exist, you would probably want to display a link here in order for people to add the first comment
    '1 comment', // 1 comment, usually phrased differently
    '% comments' // > 1 comment
); ?>

If you don't want to display the "With:" label in case there are no comments you could just put it inside an if statement. I think thismight work:

<span class="comment_meta"><?php if (wp_count_comments(get_the_ID())) : ?>With: <?php endif; ?></span>

Answer 2

You should not echo your comments_link.

  <a href="<?php comments_link(); ?>"><?php comments_number('Be the first to comment!', '1 comment.', '% comments already!'); ?></a>

or use something like this

<?php echo sprintf(__('<a href="%s">%s comment(s)</a>', 'textdomain'), get_comments_link(),get_comments_number()); ?>