graphing survey results

Howdy all,
I am looking to put a survey(s) on my site, after a user votes, I would like to be able to pull the current results and then turn it into a graph, my question is - is there a way to count the # of fields in a database? Is this a MySQL function? Or PHP? anybody have any ideas on the best way to do this?

I was thinking to count the # of fields, to determine the number of bars in the graph. Then add up the number of answers to get the upper limit of each bar.

tia.

I'm not sure if you can do this directly through mysql, but one way to do it is to get the row with mysql_fetch_assoc which creates an array of that row data then use array_keys to make an array of all the keys in the row and count that, like so:

$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
$num_fields = count(array_keys($row));
echo $num_fields;

$sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) AS count FROM table;";
mysql_query($sql);

That does it in a mysql query (much quicker)

thanks guys, but I figured out a way to do it like this.

$columns = "SHOW COLUMNS FROM polls";

$colres = mysql_query($columns);

$numbars = mysql_num_rows($colres);