In Wordpress get category ID within a blog roll - wordpress

Question

I'm not a fan of the default blog roll for a theme that I'm using, so I'm deconstructing it, so far I was able to pull into the blog roll template:
Author: get_the_author_link()
Date with formatting: the_time('F jS, Y');
What I'm having trouble with is pulling in the categor(eis) for each post. I've tried:
get_the_category(); // with or witout the get_the_ID()
But All I get back the array object. I then tried traversing to no avail. What am I doing wrong? Again, this is not an individual post, but a blog roll.

Answer 1

You're looking for get_the_category_list().
This function takes three parameters - separator, parents and post id (in that order).
So, you'll want to do something like this:
<?php echo get_the_category_list(', ', '', get_the_ID()); ?>
This will create a an unordered (ul) list with commas in between the category names. You will most likely need to use some CSS to make the li items float or set them to inline block. Something like this:
<ul>
<li>Cat 1, </li>
<li>Cat 2, </li>
<li>Cat 3</li>
<ul>
You can also use get_the_term_list(). This has a little more flexibility in the final output of the category terms.
get_the_term_list() accepts five parameters: post id, taxonomy, before, separator, after.
For your use you would do this:
<?php echo get_the_term_list( get_the_ID(), 'category', '<span>', ', ', '</span>' ); ?>
This will output something like this:
<span>Cat 1, Cat 2, Cat 3</span>
You can change the wrapper (<span>), I just used that as an example.
Here is documentation on both functions from the Codex:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_category_list
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_term_list