title: Expression Engine template variable passing
body: <p>I'm building in Expression Engine 2.3 a user profile system using Solspace's User and Friends modules. They work fine, but I'm having an incredibly difficult time with passing embedded variables around.</p>
  
  <p>I've got a <code>.profile_head</code> template that's called from each template. The profile page, the friends page, the private messaging page, etc. It builds a user navigation, displays the avatar, all the common user stuff. All of this is based off of the user ID passed through <code>{segment_3}</code>. This allows me to display a different user's info by changing this segment.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is doing this makes my URLs far too precise. I can't have users going to /users, they have to go to /users/profile/UID or the best possible scenario is an error page or redirect to the home page.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to solve this problem through variables in my template:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{embed="/users/.profile_head" uid="{segment_3}"}
   or......
  {embed="/users/.profile_head" uid="{logged_in_member_id}"}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In the <code>.profile_head</code> template file, I can print out <code>{embed:uid}</code> just fine, but when I try to assign it to anything (i.e. a loop or another template), it breaks:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!-- /users/.profile_head --&gt;
  {exp:friends:members member_id="{embed:uid}" dynamic="off" limit="1"}
   or.....
  {embed="users/.profile_column" uid="{embed:uid}"}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>For instance, if <code>{embed:uid}</code> is set as <code>{logged_in_member_id}</code>, I get the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_LNUMBER in /var/www/system/expressionengine/libraries/Functions.php(656) : eval()'d code on line 9
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is line 9:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{if logged_in_member_id == "{embed:uid}"} &lt;span class="this_is_you"&gt;This is you!&lt;/span&gt;{/if}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I really am at my wits end. I need to be able to use this profile header in templates without requiring a user id in the URL for things like the user messaging and settings pages. But nothing I try seems to be working in the least.</p>