Are there any best practices for efficiently handling table existence checks in PHP?

When checking for the existence of a table in a database using PHP, it is best practice to utilize database-specific functions or queries to efficiently handle this task. One common approach is to query the information schema of the database to check if the table exists. 

<?php

// Establish a connection to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Query the information schema to check if the table exists
$tableName = "your_table_name";
$sql = "SELECT 1 FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema = '$dbname' AND table_name = '$tableName' LIMIT 1";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    echo "Table exists";
} else {
    echo "Table does not exist";
}

// Close the connection
$conn->close();

?>

Keywords

PHP database table existence check SQL query error handling

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