Manage empty result query in MySql with PHP for Android HttpUrlConnection - php

Question

I am working in an Android application that is using an Apache server to recover information from a MySQL database with PHP. I do not know the proper way to manage situations where the request to the database is returning 0 records.
In this case I want to minimize as much as possible the process.
So far I can only figure out two ways:
1.- Return an specific XML format and then it is managed by the client. So when this find a specific tags knows there is not records in the database. I do not like this solution because I would like to catch the issue before I parse the XML. The PHP code for this would be something like this.
<?php
include ("common_function.php");
include("generate_DOM_XML.php");
//Make database connection
connectDB();
//set el cotejamiento
mysqli_query($mysqli,"SET NAME 'utf8'");
//sentence sql
$list_news_sql="SELECT new_title, new_body, new_create_time FROM table_news ORDER BY new_create_time DESC";
//results sql query
$list_news_sql_result = mysqli_query($mysqli, $list_news_sql) or die (mysqli_error($mysqli));
if(mysqli_num_rows($list_news_sql_result) < 1){
$message = "<empty>No records</empty>;
echo $message;
}else{
//First parmenter MUST be send AFTER the request is done
$xml_output = mysql_XML($mysqli,$list_news_sql_result,"news","new");
mysqli_free_result($list_news_sql_result);
closeDB();
echo $xml_output;
}
?>
2- Force the server to send an error message and ctach up it before I parse the xml. To make it I do not know if it is possible to use exit(400) or something like that and the capture the message in the client with HttpUrlConnection.getResponseCode() using a sentence if()....else and take a decission before I start the parsing process