Select, count and display (by group?)

Question

I have a MySQL Table that looks like this (id/date time):

1 | 2014-08-12 00:23:15
2 | 2013-04-02 05:13:45
3 | 2014-08-12 06:12:18
4 | 2012-11-01 02:21:04

How would I do to retrieve each unique date (3 here) and count how many elements I have for each date using PHP and MySQL?

For instance, here I would like to get and display this info:

2012-11-01: 1 item
2013-04-02: 1 item
2014-08-12: 2 items

I believe I would have to use "GROUP BY date" but whatever I do, I can't tell how many items I have for each date.

Answer 1

Use COUNT() as Fred said with GROUP BY (as you rightly believed):

SELECT 
    DATE(date_time_col), 
    COUNT(*) as cnt
FROM
    your_table
GROUP BY
    DATE(date_time_col)