Creating a new variable by combining 2 field values In my theme’s preprocess node function i’m trying to create a new variable by combining 2 existing fields, both of which are text strings. 
pseudo code is this: 

$teachers_name = $firstname + $lastname;

When looking at a print out of the Teacher object using Devel, i see the field first name is an array, structured like this…

field_first_name
    und
        0
            safe_value ‘Lisa’


but so far it’s not working at all. i’m not accessing the variables correctly. 

function myTheme_preprocess_node(&amp;$variables){
    if($variables['type']=='teacher') {
        $variables['teachers_name'] = $variables['field_first_name’][‘und’][0]    [‘safe_value’];
    }


how can i access the text string of field 'first name'? thanks!
You should use entity module and entity_metadata_wrapper . I already answered a similar question in here.