Question

I would like to check if a page exists. My file is article.php . The article’s URLs are article.php?id=1 article.php?id=2 etc. But when I check it this way it doesn’t work:

$filecheck = "article.php?id=$id";
if (file_exists($filecheck)) {
echo "This article exists.";
} else {
echo "Sorry this article does not exist.";
}

But it always returns “Sorry this article does not exist.”
How could I fix this?

Answer 1

The file “article.php?id=$id” will not exist as it is not a physical file.

I am assuming that you are using the $id to find an article that exists in a database. If this is the case then the file_exists function is not what you need.

What you will need to do is write a quick MySQL statement to check if the article exists and then go from there.

Something like this perhaps:

$query = "SELECT * FROM articles WHERE id='$id'";
$result = mysql_query($query);

// Check if result is there (ie article exists)
if ($result) {
    echo "This article exists.";
} else {
    echo "Sorry this article does not exist.";
}

I hope that helps. Let me know if you need anything else.