title: can't echo out an int variable
body: <p>I've tried to use the solutions presented in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11456707/single-value-mysqli">this question</a>,
  to no avail, so I used this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  $stat = "SELECT MAX(employee_id) FROM employees";
   $querysult = intval($connection, $stat);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Where <code>employee_id</code> is an int(3) in the database table.
  For some reason, the above code actually gets the values from the database, despite there not being a <code>mysqli_query()</code> in sight. But my question is about what I did immediately after, which was</p>
  
  <pre><code>echo "Id: " . $querysult;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and which output nothing but</p>
  
  <pre><code>Id:
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and no number. I've also tried casting the number to a string, and concatenating it to an empty string before the echo statement.</p>