MySQL – Does Table Exist w/o Throwing Errors

There are times where you would like to know if a table exists before executing an query. Most solutions require having MySQL throw an error saying “table does not exist,” but I prefer a cleaner way. I found on this forum post a clean way to do it:

/* example with table name: table_name */
SHOW TABLES LIKE 'table_name';

This solution will return 1 row if it exists, and 0 rows if it doesn’t. Here is a PHP example using this:

function DoesTableExist($name)
{
   $sql = "SHOW TABLES LIKE '$name'";
   $result = mysql_query($sql);
   if(mysql_num_rows($result) > 0)
   {
      return true;
   }
   else
   {
      return false;
   }
}

if(DoesTableExist('users'))
{
   echo "Users table found!";
}
else
{
   echo "Users NOT FOUND!!!";
}

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