Title: Question – PHP variables Last modified: August 18, 2016 --- # Question – PHP variables * [Hannah S.L.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fernashes/) * (@fernashes) * Automattic Happiness Engineer * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/) * Hey all… question. I need to get a hold of the name of the category of each post but I can’t figure out how. * * That’s the tag that I’m looking at… I’ve tried: * * But that only prints “the_category”, not the actual contents of the field. Any ideas? Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total) * [oriecat](https://wordpress.org/support/users/oriecat/) * (@oriecat) * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-152859) * I use * Thread Starter [Hannah S.L.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fernashes/) * (@fernashes) * Automattic Happiness Engineer * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-152861) * Huh? Oh, ack, did I miss the function part? * Thread Starter [Hannah S.L.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fernashes/) * (@fernashes) * Automattic Happiness Engineer * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-152865) * Thanks, Oriecat! 🙂 I was distracted by the & that was passed with the function as well. * This barrier is gone! 🙂 * Thread Starter [Hannah S.L.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fernashes/) * (@fernashes) * Automattic Happiness Engineer * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-152913) * Ok, I thought that that had solved it… but it didn’t! * $cat=the_category(); The line above always causes the category name to be printed… $cat is NOT filled. * Proof of that is this line: echo $cat.’blkaat’; * $cat isn’t printed, but that nonesense is. * Can somebody give me a hand with what exactly “the_category()” function is doing? * [carthik](https://wordpress.org/support/users/carthik/) * (@carthik) * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-152932) * [http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_category](http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_category) * Thread Starter [Hannah S.L.](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fernashes/) * (@fernashes) * Automattic Happiness Engineer * [21 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-152940) * Thanks, 2fargon, but that’s unforuantely not the solution… all it does is tell different settings for customizing the output that you print on the screen. I need to know how to stuff it into a variable……….. and this doesn’t work either, unfortunately: * switch (the_category()) { case ‘Whatever’: $icon=whatever; break; * case “Blog”: $icon=blog; break; * default: $icon=whoknows; break; } * [salogan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/salogan/) * (@salogan) * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153566) * Been tearing out what little hair I have left trying to do exactly the same thing. * I’m running a query based on a ‘calendar’ category (I’m using Event Calendar 3.1 which sorts things nicely in that category) and I then want to only display posts if they are member of another category. So I thought I’d simply find out what categories a post is in and do an ‘if’. * Anyone got any ideas how to get access in PHP to the categories of a post? * Thanks * Moderator [Samuel Wood (Otto)](https://wordpress.org/support/users/otto42/) * (@otto42) * WordPress.org Admin * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153567) * Depends on what you want to do. * Do you want to check the categories to see if a given post is in a category? If so, you’d use get_the_category(), which returns an array of categories. Then you can check the cat_name on each one to see what the category name is. * Or if, like the original poster, you want a list of categories as a string, then you’d probably want get_the_category_list() instead. * [salogan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/salogan/) * (@salogan) * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153568) * Thanks Otto, your first guess is exactly what I did. I run get_the_category() and look through the returned array and display only those that are in the required category. The results is a nice ‘what’s on next’ page sorted correctly by date for one category. * I recommend this page ([http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description](http://codex.wordpress.org/Database_Description)) for folks trying to determine how to get stuff out of the db. * Thanks again… * [salogan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/salogan/) * (@salogan) * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153569) * Just found an even easier way… * I want to print out posts in ascending date order for only one category, so… * (my calendar is category 2 and I only want entries from category 7) * ` do stuff * Works fine… * [salogan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/salogan/) * (@salogan) * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153570) * One last question, Otto…. * Is there a complete list somewhere of all the functions like get_the_category() etc?? * [yansky](https://wordpress.org/support/users/yansky/) * (@yansky) * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153571) * [http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags](http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags) * [salogan](https://wordpress.org/support/users/salogan/) * (@salogan) * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153572) * Otto42 mentioned a get_the_category_list() function that isn’t on the Template_Tags page? I can’t find any reference to it anywhere else. Otto – how come you know about it?! * Steve * Moderator [Samuel Wood (Otto)](https://wordpress.org/support/users/otto42/) * (@otto42) * WordPress.org Admin * [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153573) * > Otto – how come you know about it?! * Because I rule. 😉 * Actually, it’s because I eschew such minor things as documentation and just grep through the code for whatever I happen to want to find. I know about get_the_category_list() because I read the code for it in template-functions-category.php. Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total) The topic ‘Question – PHP variables’ is closed to new replies. * 14 replies * 6 participants * Last reply from: [Samuel Wood (Otto)](https://wordpress.org/support/users/otto42/) * Last activity: [19 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/question-php-variables/#post-153573) * Status: not resolved ## Topics ### Topics with no replies ### Non-support topics ### Resolved topics ### Unresolved topics ### All topics