Determining if a File Exists with WordBasic

As you are programming your macros, you may have a need to determine if a particular file exists on disk. For instance, the purpose of your macro may be to open and read from a text file. Before doing so, you will want to check to see if the file exists, in order to avoid an error.

The following WordBasic function can be used to check for the existence of a file. All you need to do is pass it the full filename as a string, and the macro returns either True (if the file exists) or False (if it doesn't).

Function FileThere(FileNm$)
     FileThere = (Files$(FileNm$) > "")
End Function

You can use the function similar to the following:

If FileThere("c:\myfile.txt") Then
     '
     ' Do stuff here
     '
End If