How can I assign bloginfo path or thumbnail path to a variable and call it in markup?

Question

In my head this sound right. I check if the post has a thumbnail. If it has, I assign the post thumbnail to a variable that I call as the source for my background image. If the post does not have a thumbnail, I assign a placeholder image as the background.

However, I'm having some issues :/

The code block below breaks my site, and if I change the else statement to $large_image_url = bloginfo('template_directory')?>/library/images/default-header-image.jpg<?php; it actually echoes out the variable as a line of text instead of saving it in the variable.

<?php 
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
    $large_image_url = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id($post->ID), '' );
} else {
    $large_image_url = bloginfo('template_directory')'/library/images/default-header-image.jpg';
} ?>

<section class="header-image" style="background-image: url('<?php echo $large_image_url[0] ?>');">
</section>

Can someone give me a push in the right direction?

Answer 1

The bloginfo() function outputs immediately. since you're storing to a $variable you'll want to use get_bloginfo() instead. also, you're missing a concatenation.

$large_image_url = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/library/images/default-header-image.jpg';