How to check whether SELECT EXISTS returns a value or not?

Question

I am trying to quickly determine if a user_ID is the owner of a \'goal\'. I believe my SQL query is good, but I\'m trying to find a nice way of checking the result!

Answer 1

I like gbn's answer the best, but I wanted to point out that this:

if (@mysql_num_rows(mysql_query($query))!=1) {
     return false;
} else {
     return true;
}

can be simplified to:

return @mysql_num_rows(mysql_query($query)) == 1;