html - my <ul> dissapears when generating <li> in PHP? -

i'm having weird error ul tag dissapears when generate li tags in it, have no idea if here me great.

the html gets generated in:

<div class="col-md-12 col-xs-12">     <div id="tickets">         <ul>'.$ticket->generatetickets().'</ul>     </div> </div> 

my php function

public function generatetickets(){     $cols = array ('id','description','ticket_id');     $items = $this->db->orderby('id')->get("tickets", null, $cols);     if ($this->db->count > 0){         foreach ($items $item) {              echo '<li><a href="?p=support&action=readticket&tid='.$item['id'].'">ticket #'.$item['ticket_id'].'<br/></a>             <p>'.substr($item['description'],0,20).'..</p>             </li>';         }     } } 

console showing ul dissapeared: http://piclair.com/r45q7

in generatetickets function, you're echoing immediately. since concatenation in html file done after function done, output first. should either return values ( replace echo return , move out of loop ) or in html, dont concatenate strings.

$result = ''; foreach ( $items $item ) {     $result .= '<li ...'; } return $result;