Wordpress Tips

Get Category ID by name and vice versa

Feeleep on Jun 22, 2009

Tags: category ID, category name, how-to

Have you ever wanted to find out certain category ID by its name or maybe do that in reverse? Maybe I’m missing something but there’s no method to achieve that via built-in WordPress functions so here is quick and dirty way of getting category ID by category name and vice versa.

Get cat ID by name


<?php
	$category_slug = "myCategory"; // just an example name/slug
	$category_ID = $wpdb->get_var( "SELECT term_id FROM $wpdb->terms WHERE slug = '" . $category_slug . "'" );
?>

Get cat name by ID


<?php
	$category_ID = 1; // just an example ID
	$category_name = $wpdb->get_var( "SELECT name FROM $wpdb->terms WHERE term_id = " . $category_id );
?>

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Comments (5)

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richard on Jul 12, 2009
So very helpful! Bookmarked that, always need a useful shortcut like that in theme development.
genesys on Sep 2, 2009
There’s an easier way:
“get_category_by_slug()”
eg:

term_id;
?>

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_category_by_slug
Feeleep on Sep 3, 2009
Yeah, but that’s not the same. Slug is probably returned as “some-category-name” which is not OK in terms of usability (for example navigation).
Rodrigo on Sep 17, 2009
And what about get_category_by_path()?
Feeleep on Sep 17, 2009
I guess you should find out category slug first. It’s a little bit longer way, maybe I’m wrong…