Latest version broke code

I have a snippet that loads at table of amazon links based on a titleid. In a previous version, the following code worked well:

<a href="https://[wbcr_php_snippet id='17166' titleid='8081698']" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Paper:</a>

This applies to the old code at https://mountainsangha.org/products-on-sale. The links to the paper version on amazon are blank (“https://”). This code uses the following snippet, the one referred to above:

global $alinks;
echo $alinks[$titleid];

and used to work fine. Now I have to use a new snippet which goes against my sense of “good coding ethics”:

global $alinks, $alink; $titleid;
$alink = $alinks[$titleid];
echo "<a href='https://" . $alink . "' target='_blank'>";

Is there something I’m missing? Why doesn’t the first code work?

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