no such file, yet it exists

[Anon]

I get the following error messages

Warning: Unable to access /home/retford/public_html/pages/data/[e-mail] in /home/retford/public_html/pages/database.php on line 133

Warning: file("/home/retford/public_html/pages/data/[e-mail] ") - No such file or directory in /home/retford/public_html/pages/database.php on line 133

Yet the file clearly exists and can be viewed by my browser by pasting the path from the error message into it.

what is happenin?

[Anon]

would you post the code that produces this error? I wonder if the way you specified the offset from document root has caused this.