Having difficulty with TAG_info in an eval{}

System

I'm fairly sure that I'm missing something obvious and will kick myself when someone points out what it is, but I'm stuck. I am storing some configuration info in a database and trying to use it to generate a portion of my TAG_info. Because I want to reuse the code, I've moved it to a module. However, when the method returns the string containing the call to TAG_info, and I try to eval it, the field does not appear on the instantiation page. I've spent a couple of hours on this, trying to simplify it down to a couple of test cases that illustrate exactly where the problem is occuring, without the complexity of calling the method in the module.

This works:

eval {
    TAG_info(
         "earl" => "<input type='text' value='test'>"
    );
};

This does not:

$tagInfo = qq|
    TAG_info(
         "earl" => "<input type='text' value='test'>"
    );|;

eval {
    $tagInfo
};

So then I thought that perhaps the eval was being run prior to $tagInfo coming into scope (grasping at straws), but this works:

$bubba = "This is a test";
eval {
 TAG_info(
    "earl" => "<input type='text' value='$bubba'>"
   );
};

So, I'm stumped at the moment.