php mysql count total without duplicate

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT `column`) AS `cnt` FROM `table`;

will eliminate duplicates.

Then, from php, fetch the cnt column value the way you would do for any other regular query.

I like the SQL answers posted above. They're efficient and performed on the query, itself. But if you have already read the items from the database into an array, you can use PHP's array_unique--then get a count of that result into an array with count. For example:

<?php
$input = array("a" => "dog", "cat", "b" => "cat", "dog", "mouse");
$result = array_unique($input);
$uniqueCount = count($result);
?>

Hope this helps. :)