How to get the currently logged in user's role in Drupal 7?

Question

How to get the currently logged in user's role in Drupal 7 ? Do you know a simple way of accomplish this ? Is there some drupal core functions for this?

Answer 1

$user->roles is an array of the roles that belong to the user keyed by the role ID, value is the role string. So if you wanted to check if user had role 'authenticated user' your code snippet would look something like this (not necessarily the most optimized approach, in_array is a fairly performance-expensive function):

global $user;

if (in_array('authenticated user', $user->roles)) {
     //do stuff here
}

Note that in_array can also accept an array as the "needle" (argument #1) so you could check against multiple role options:

in_array(array('authenticated user', 'anonymous user'), $user->roles);

Answer 2

You can access to the user roles by just using this PHP snippet:

<?php $GLOBALS['user']->roles; ?>

Answer 3

I have found a interesting solution to check for multiple roles of a user:

global $user;
$check = array_intersect(array('moderator', 'administrator'), array_values($user->roles));
if (empty($check) ? FALSE : TRUE) {
    // is admin
} else {
    // is not admin
}