Getting the the permalink into a variable ?

OK i’m not expecting a great deal of help considering all my other posts have remained unanswered but here goes anyway ??

OK i’m coding a routine to go into template.php and everything is working great.

However how do i get the real life permalink of the post.

I’ve tried using

$post->guid but that’s storing some weird old paths (i.e. https://localhost as well as other variants). Ironically however wordpress is displaying, using the the_permalink () function in normal templates, just right.

So i tried (within my loop) to capture that as a string using

<strong>ob_start();
the_permalink ();
$link= ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();</strong>

But although that works in say the home.php template it refuses to work in my templates.php under my function.

I have every other variable i need working in that function apart from the permalink. Anyone any ideas how i can get it to read that into a variable so i can output it into a a href within my function ?

I even looked (and failed) to find the the_permalink () function in the wordpress php files.

I really need help on this one guys.