test for membership/existence

[cornercuttinjoe]

is there an easy way to test to see if a particular tuple even exists?

the way i have kind of been doing it is something like

"SELECT a FROM A WHERE b = '$b'";

and if it returns null, then i know. But is there a mysql/php call that will tell you if a particular tuple just exists, like a true false?

thanks ahead of time.

[devinemke]

if all you want to know is if a ceratin record exists then the simpliest way is to do a COUNT() query:

$result = mysql_query('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table WHERE id = ' . $id) or exit(mysql_error());
if (mysql_result($result, 0)) {echo 'record found';}
else {echo 'record not found';}