Get The Category Name & Category Link Inside The Loop In WordPress

Question

Is there a way to get the name of the category and the link to the category page separately inside the wordpress loop. I don't have the id of the category either and I wanna display images instead of category names therefore the_category() doesn't work for me.

Thanks

Appreciate all the answers..

Answer 1

get_the_category() works in THE LOOP. Using this you will get array of category object for each post the loop is currently processing. example :

//the loop
$categories = get_the_category();
//the loop cont....
var_dump($categories);
    array
      0 => 
        object(stdClass)[191]
          public 'term_id' => &string '1' (length=1)
          public 'name' => &string 'Uncategorized' (length=13)
          public 'slug' => &string 'uncategorized' (length=13)
          public 'term_group' => string '0' (length=1)
          public 'term_taxonomy_id' => string '1' (length=1)
          public 'taxonomy' => string 'category' (length=8)
          public 'description' => &string '' (length=0)
          public 'parent' => &string '0' (length=1)
          public 'count' => &string '1' (length=1)
          public 'object_id' => string '66' (length=2)
          public 'cat_ID' => &string '1' (length=1)
          public 'category_count' => &string '1' (length=1)
          public 'category_description' => &string '' (length=0)
          public 'cat_name' => &string 'Uncategorized' (length=13)
          public 'category_nicename' => &string 'uncategorized' (length=13)
          public 'category_parent' => &string '0' (length=1)
      1 => 
        object(stdClass)[190]
          public 'term_id' => &string '3' (length=1)
          public 'name' => &string 'asd' (length=3)
          public 'slug' => &string 'asd' (length=3)
          public 'term_group' => string '0' (length=1)
          public 'term_taxonomy_id' => string '3' (length=1)
          public 'taxonomy' => string 'category' (length=8)
          public 'description' => &string '' (length=0)
          public 'parent' => &string '0' (length=1)
          public 'count' => &string '1' (length=1)
          public 'object_id' => string '66' (length=2)
          public 'cat_ID' => &string '3' (length=1)
          public 'category_count' => &string '1' (length=1)
          public 'category_description' => &string '' (length=0)
          public 'cat_name' => &string 'asd' (length=3)
          public 'category_nicename' => &string 'asd' (length=3)
          public 'category_parent' => &string '0' (length=1)

now you can iterate through each category, like so

foreach($categories as $category){
   echo $category->name; //category name
   $cat_link = get_category_link($category->cat_ID);
   echo '<a href="'.$cat_link.'">'.$category->name.'</a>'; // category link
}

Answer 2

You can use:

$category = get_the_category(); 
echo '<a href="'.get_category_link($category[0]->cat_ID).'"><img src="'.$category[0]->cat_name.'" alt="'.$category[0]->cat_name.'" /></a>';

Or:

foreach(get_the_category() as $category)
{
    echo '<a href="'.get_category_link($category->cat_ID).'"><img src="'.$category->cat_name.'" alt="'.$category->cat_name.'" /></a>';
}

With get_the_category() you get the category, and with get_category_link() you'll get the Link of the Category.