Check to see if table exists ?

[jeddiki]

How do I check if a table exits or not ?

Can I just stick an "if" in front of this ?

$sql = "DROP TABLE `clients`";
$result = mysql_query($sql)
    or die("could not DROP clients");
 

My script builds all my tables, but if they exist already it needs to first drop
them. Problem is, if the tables don't exist and it tries to drop them, then it also fails.

What should I do ?

[TheServant]

What about having just dropping it. If it can't find it it can't do anything so nothing changed. If it can, it will drop it. All you have to do is remove any output in your die() function.

[Atli]

Hi.

You could try:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `tablename`;
CREATE TABLE `tablename` (
  /* etc... */
);

Which would drop the table if it exists, and then create it.

Or, if you would rather not drop the table if it exists, but only create it if it did not, you could do:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `tablename` (
  /* etc... */
);

If you just want to find out if a table exists, you can do:

SHOW TABLES LIKE 'tablename'

Note that you can use % as a wildcard char in the search string.