Question

Is there a way to check whether files (with either an absolute or relative path) exists? Im using PHP. I found a couple of method but either they only accept absolute or relative but not both. Thanks.

Answer 1

file_exists($file); does the trick for both relative and absolute paths.

What’s more useful, however, is having absolute paths without hardcoding it. The best way to do that is use dirname(__FILE__) which gets the directory’s full path of the current file in ether UNIX or Windows format. Then we can use realpath() which conveniently returns false if file does not exist. All you have to do then is specify a relative path from that file’s directory and put it all together:

$path = dirname(__FILE__) . '/include.php';
if (realpath($path)) {
    include($path);
}