montjoile 0 Light Poster

hi. I'm working with php-oracle and I need to do a query that I know will return a unique string, but when I execute the query all that I recieve is a number. Why?

this is my code:

$nombre=oci_parse($conexion, "select nombre_cliente from cliente where cod_cliente=$codigo_de_cliente");
$nombre_de_cliente=oci_execute($nombre);

nombre_cliente is varchar type
cod_cliente is number, and is my primary key

what Im doing wrong? I cannot see anything