I'm kinda new to PHP and I'm trying to add a tag within a PHP variable.

This is what I have, and it's not working.

```
$linkText .= "<span>" . ( 'Reply', $this->_slug ) . "</span>";

```

Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

Thanks :)

UPDATE:

This is the complete working code:

```
$linkText = __( 'Reply', $this->_slug );
$linkAttrs['href'] = "http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?in_reply_to={$tweet->id_str}";
$linkAttrs['class'] = 'in-reply-to';
$linkAttrs['title'] = $linkText;
$widgetContent .= $this->_buildLink( $linkText, $linkAttrs );

```

What I'm trying to do here is to add a tag around $linkText so that I get a result like

```
<a href="#"><span>Title</span></a>

```