MySQL check if a table exists without throwing an exception

Question

What is the best way to check if a table exists in MySQL (preferably via PDO in PHP) without throwing an exception. I do not feel like parsing the results of "SHOW TABLES LIKE" et cetera. There must be some sort of boolean query?

Answer 1

If you're using MySQL 5.0 and later, you could try:

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM information_schema.tables 
WHERE table_schema = '[database name]' 
AND table_name = '[table name]';

Any results indicate the table exists.

From: http://www.electrictoolbox.com/check-if-mysql-table-exists/

Answer 2

I don't know the PDO syntax for it, but this seems pretty straight-forward:

$result = mysql_query("SHOW TABLES LIKE 'myTable'");
$tableExists = mysql_num_rows($result) > 0;