WP puts external links after domain's URL?

Hi all,

For a client, I want to make it as easy as possible to create a list of courses, which are clickable to external links.

The title of the post is clickable, and I use the content for the url, like this:

“><?php the_title(); ?>

So this way the title is displayed, but in the href part, the content is displayed. This happens when I click it:

https://localhost:8888/category/cursus/THE_EXTERNAL_LINK

When I inspect the page using firebug, I see:

Title goes here

Someone has a clue why it puts the external URL AFTER the domain’s url?

Thanks!