Counting countries once in DB...help?

[moonbrat]

I'm trying to union all my tables and group by countries using something like this:

$query = "SELECT DISTINCT(country) FROM (SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(country) FROM $table UNION ALL) AS total GROUP BY country";

Because I have 25 member tables in my database and I keep adding tables (each table is a different subject) and 951 members in total from 220 countries (including repeated countries) BUT it's ACTUALLY 60 different countries without repeats (I went through and counted manually).

HOWEVER, mysql is counting repeated countries e.g. USA 30 times when I only want the repeating countries to be counted ONCE.

How do I get the countries to be counted only once? The query example above is giving me 0 and when I write it any other way it gives me 220.
I came to that code from reading MANY tutorials of how to select something within a select and unioning all tables to return a result, but it's not doing what I want it to do.

Can someone please help me?

[tomhath]

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do, what I think you want is something like this. You need to UNION together the countries from each table as either a subselect or view, then get the distinct count from that result:

SELECT count( DISTINCT m.country )
FROM (
  SELECT country FROM members1
  UNION ALL
  SELECT country FROM members2
) AS m