PHP - detect mysql update/insertion failure due to violated unique constraint

Question

This is kind of similar to this question:

PHP MySQL INSERT fails due to unique constraint

but I have a different twist. Let\'s say I have a table with only

Answer 1

Now that it's the year 2015, there are very few reasons not to be using PHP's PDO implementation:

http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php

The proper, modern, "OO" method for detecting and handling an insertion failure due to a key constraint violation is as follows:

try {
    //PDO query execution goes here.
}
catch (\PDOException $e) {
    if ($e->errorInfo[1] == 1062) {
        //The INSERT query failed due to a key constraint violation.
    }
}

The PDOException object has a lot more to say about the specific nature of the error, too (more detail than one could possibly ever want or need, seemingly).

http://php.net/PDOException