How do I check for the existence of an external file with XSL?

Question

I\'ve found a lot of examples that reference Java and C for this, but how do I, or can I, check for the existence of an external file with XSL.

First, I realize that

Answer 1

Back to pgfearo's notice.

A proposed File Module EXPath specification would support file-system functions such as this (file:exists() in the spec) as standard XPath extension functions. There isn't yet an XSLT implementation for this, but its worth watching.

For those who need to check if an file exists or not.

file:exists($path as xs:string)

works fine now.