file_exists as negative

[halifaxer]

very quick one boys and girls. how can i write this within an if statement to reflect if it returns a negative results.

have tried

if (file_exists($pic_m) == '0') { ... }

but it's still returning some TRUE values. have tried ="FALSE" also but can't seem to nail it.

any help?

[Fou-Lu]

"FALSE" indicates a string in PHP. '0' also indicates a string.
file_exists is extremely open. Since its only a boolean, this is the easiest way:

if (!file_exists($pic_m))
{
    // do stuff
} 

Offhand, you can probably do the same check in what.... 10 or so different ways.
If it was a resource like MySQL, you need to check for identical matches. PHP is datatype weak, so 0 == false, though 0 === false. Checking the api is the best way to determine this, things like mysql_num_rows will return false on error, but will return 0 if it has none. These ones require a if (false !== mysql_num_rows($qryRes)), since one is a failure and one is just no records.