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?
Querying the information_schema database using prepared statement looks like the most reliable and secure solution.
$sql = "SELECT 1 FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema = database() AND table_name = ?";
$stmt = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$stmt->execute([$tableName]);
$exists = (bool)$stmt->fetchColumn();