How can i check if a path points to a folder or a file?

Question

I'm building a small class for my zend application (using MVC). This class receive either a folder path or a file path. If its a folder path, i want to list all the files in that folder to make them downloadable. If its a file i want to make a single link to this file to make it downloadable.

The file/folder i'm pointing to is /zendApplicationName/Public/Models/Subfolder/File.

i tried to check using

is_file('pathToFile')

and

is_dir('pathToFolder')

to check the path that i build using

APPLICATION_PATH . '..\public' .  $this->_path . 'file.docx'

and

$this->_baseUrl' .  $this->_path . 'file.docx' // i took the baseURL from Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance()

I also tried to use the old school php version

$protocol = strtolower(substr($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"],0,5))=='https'?'https':'http';
$path = $protocol . '://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $this->_baseUrl . $this->_path . 'file.docx'

Thanks in advance

EDIT :

The problem is that even if the folder and the file exists, both function return false

Answer 1

Thanks for you comments, both where really useful. They made me recheck my code and the path was wrong

final path output is:

C:\wamp\www\elul\trunk\elul\application/../public/models/feuilleDeRoute/

using :

APPLICATION_PATH . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . '..' . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'public' . $this->_path;

This way both can be checked, the folder and the file