Error handling and 'if exists'

[Tom Melly]

Hi,

I have a procedure that basically executes stored sql statements. There is an error handler*, and mostly everything works fine.

However, the following is trapped by the error handler if t_person doesn't exist:

drop temporary table if exists t_person;

Ideally, I'd like to trap:

drop temporary table t_person;

but not the former.

Any ideas?

* the error handler:

  DECLARE EXIT HANDLER FOR SQLEXCEPTION
  BEGIN
    set @sql = 'select \'Invalid SQL or bad parameter resulting in invalid SQL\' as `Error`';
    prepare stmt from @sql;
    execute stmt;
  END;