Returning shortcode html

I’m a bit of a newbie at PHP… Let’s say I write a function that emits a bunch of html:

function foo() {
   echo "<p>";
   foreach( $somelist as $someitem ) {
      echo $someitem->somefield;
   }
   echo "</p>";
}

If I want to make this into shortcode, then it needs to ‘return’ the html rather than echo it. For example:

function foo() {
   result=''
   result=result."<p>";
   foreach ( $somelist as $someitem ) {
      result=result.$someitem.somefield;
   }
   result=result."</p>";
   return result;
}

This looks somewhat inelegant and actually downright messy as the shortcode function gets more complex and I need to output more html. Is there any kind of a PHP shortcut that I’m missing or a better way to output wordpress shortcode than to use repeated string concatenations?

thanks,
scott