Linking to node breaks when title attribute present

The following code is very unreliable; it presumes too much about the output of the l() function:

<?php
$link = explode('|||', l('|||', 'node/'. $nid));
?>

When altering the link output in the theme to add a 'title' attribute using the link's text as input, the code breaks horribly.

Resulting output is:
<a href="/content/whole-breast-ultrasound-technology" title="<img src="http://domain.com/sites/default/files/styles/mc_thumbnail_wide/public/video_embed_field_thumbnails/youtube/thumbnail.jpg" width="300" height="135" alt="" />">