title: How to handle symlinks when reading data from a file path in swift
body: <p>I have a file path as a string. I want to:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Test if there's a file there</li>
  <li>Read the contents of the file as a string</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>the problem I'm having is that sometimes that file path involves a symbolic link (symlink). Maybe to the file itself. Maybe to one of the directories above the file.</p>
  
  <p>[EDIT] closing this because the following code (that I started with), actually works just fine, there were just multiple levels of user error involved. Thanks for the input folks.  </p>
  
  <pre class="lang-swift prettyprint-override"><code>func getUserResource(relativeFilePath: String) -&gt; String? {
      let fileManager = NSFileManager.defaultManager()
  
      let userFilePath = NSHomeDirectory() + relativeFilePath
  
      if(fileManager.fileExistsAtPath(userFilePath))
      {
          do {
              return try String(contentsOfFile: userFilePath, encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding);
          } catch {
              return nil;
          }
      }
      return nil;
  }
  </code></pre>