Check if a database table exists using PHP/PDO

Do:

select 1 from your_table

and then catch the error. If you don't get any error, but resultset with one column containing "1", then the table exists.

Before I go on, I do realise this is a MySQL-specific solution.

While all the solutions mentioned here may work, I (personally) like to keep PDO from throwing exceptions (personal preference, that's all).

As such, I use the following to test for table creation instead:

SHOW TABLES LIKE 'some_table_of_mine';

There's no error state generated if the table doesn't exist, you simply get a zero resultset. Works fast and consistently for me.

Here's a complete function for checking if a table exists.

/**
 * Check if a table exists in the current database.
 *
 * @param PDO $pdo PDO instance connected to a database.
 * @param string $table Table to search for.
 * @return bool TRUE if table exists, FALSE if no table found.
 */
function tableExists($pdo, $table) {

    // Try a select statement against the table
    // Run it in try-catch in case PDO is in ERRMODE_EXCEPTION.
    try {
        $result = $pdo->query("SELECT 1 FROM {$table} LIMIT 1");
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        // We got an exception (table not found)
        return FALSE;
    }

    // Result is either boolean FALSE (no table found) or PDOStatement Object (table found)
    return $result !== FALSE;
}

Note: PDO will only throw exceptions if it is told to, by default it is silent and throws no exceptions. Thats why we need to check the result as well. See PDO error handling at php.net