Findind repeated elements in a cell of a Table and report number of cases

I have a table for which I would like to find how many times a certain item is repeated (for one column [variable] only at a time), and have the number of times it happens (sorted optimally). What is the way around this?

Answer 1

[KSSV]

Let a be column.

xbins = unique(a);
[counts,centres] = hist(a,xbins);
R = [centres counts']

[Tahariet Sharon]

Thanks. However, my variable a is a list of names of countries

   {'US'}
    {'China'}
    etc.

This code seems to work with nummerical data.