right on, thanks for the help guys. saved me another day of tearing my hair out, haha. muchas gracias later -james

i'm just getting into programming and for one of my projects involves opening a file, but if it doesn't exist it is not supposed to create one, but rather output an error message. in some cases, if i give it a file location that doesn't exist, it outputs the message and doesn't create a file, but most of the time it creates the file and doesn't output the message. why is this? any help would be much appreciated thanks -james jnerv