What are the best practices for handling empty result sets in PHP queries to prevent errors?

When querying a database in PHP, it is important to handle empty result sets to prevent errors. One way to do this is by checking if the result set is empty before trying to access any data. This can be done using functions like `mysqli_num_rows()` or `rowCount()` to determine if there are any rows returned by the query. If the result set is empty, you can handle it gracefully by displaying a message to the user or taking appropriate action in your code. 

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

// Check if there are any rows returned
if(mysqli_num_rows($result) > 0) {
    // Loop through the result set and display data
    while($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
        echo $row['column_name'] . "<br>";
    }
} else {
    echo "No results found.";
}

Keywords

empty result sets error handling PHP queries error prevention data retrieval

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