Hi Janine,
Since its proving to be difficult, why not just construct the string in tcl. I also think its more proper this way. Just get the data from sql and construct the string in tcl.
Also content_item__get_title is a very slow plsql call from what I recall, atleast in PG. You would like to avoid that if possible. There are better ways to get the title of a revision or latest/live revision title than using that plsql proc.