What are best practices for handling empty search results in PHP when querying a database?

When querying a database in PHP, it is important to handle empty search results gracefully to provide a better user experience. One common approach is to check if the query returned any rows and then display a message to the user if no results were found. This can be achieved by using functions like `mysqli_num_rows()` to determine the number of rows returned by the query.

// Perform a database query
$result = mysqli_query($conn, "SELECT * FROM table WHERE condition");

// Check if any rows were returned
if(mysqli_num_rows($result) > 0) {
    // Display search results
    while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
        // Display search results
    }
} else {
    // Display a message indicating no results were found
    echo "No results found.";
}

// Free the result set
mysqli_free_result($result);