Substitute for "has wall to right/left"?

Like the title says, I'm looking for a way to replicate that expression for the platform behavior from CC to deal with the pesky problem of your character awkwardly running even though there's a wall in his face. <img src="smileys/smiley17.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I was going to use overlap at offset, but that isn't here either. What other ways can I do this with the current functionality?

Another typical solution is to have an invisible "detector" sprite, always positioned to the right and left of your object. To test if you're against a wall, test if one of the detectors overlaps a wall.