Question

This is my first time playing with PHP, and I’m having trouble making a basic if/then statement. I want to do something like

if file exists
show the html code
else
show different html code.

Here’s where I’m at currently —

<?php
if ( file_exists('pdf/'.'htmlspecialchars($_POST['apt'], ENT_COMPAT)'.'.pdf') {
    echo "the file exists";
}  else {
    echo "file does not exist";
}
?>

I think the problem here is how I wrote the

file_exists('pdf/'.'htmlspecialchars($_POST['apt'], ENT_COMPAT)'.'.pdf')

Thoughts greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

There are two problems. Firstly, you are missing a closing bracket at the end of your if condition, and secondly you have quotes where you should not, surrounding the call to htmlspecialchars.

The correct code would be:

if (file_exists('pdf/'.htmlspecialchars($_POST['apt'], ENT_COMPAT).'.pdf')) {
    echo "the file exists";
}  else {
    echo "file does not exist";
}