Evaluating Variables at the correct time

Hi There, I'm a bit of a newbie here I'm afraid so I'm sorry if this is an obvious question. I have a script which read includes an html file. The html makes a call so a function in the main script. This call passes a string which includes variables i.e. : <td>$title</td><td>$name</td> in the function that gets called the variables $title and $name get populated with values and then the script echos the html string to the client. The problem is that the variables in the html string get evaluated at the point it is passed into the function not as the point it is echoed. Can anyone help? Thanks Ben Wrigley