Sorry, I may be the only one, but I'm not following. What are you trying to do?

Most of the methods and functions I use return data (a lot of those simply because all I want is a boolean response from them). I do use a few that directly output data using echo or other means, and they display that data where ever I want them to, based on where I put the function call.

Edit: I gotta ask why do you hate return? The basic idealogy behind a function is that it returns something, a value, be it boolean, data, etc. Look at PHP's built in functionality. substr() doesn't directly echo data, it returns it to you.
-m