handling a SELECT that returns nothing

I am writing a web php application that is processing a request form. There are multiple times when I need to check if a record exists (i.e. user record) and if so, check the inputted data against the data already in the database and confirm whether the inputted data should update the database. I am getting stuck in my check of whether a record yet exists. I thought that $result in the code snippet below would be empty, so I thought I could use the empty() function in an if conditional. But a later conditional on the returned result of 0 never happened, so I echoed the $result of the mysql_query. I have a completely empty database and my initial test should load my new record, but I am finding that the $result is being filled with Resource id #4 from the mysql_query. Why? What does that mean? Why wouldn't it be empty? And more importantly, how do I this check properly? Thanks, Tim <?php function record_exist($select_value, $search_value, $table, $field) { $query = "SELECT $select_value FROM $table WHERE $field = '{$search_value}'"; $result = mysql_query("SELECT $select_value FROM $table WHERE $field='{$search_value}'") or die(mysql_error()); echo "$result"."<br>"; if (empty($result)) {

      return 0;

} else {

      return $result;

} } ?>