Wordpress Category vs. Sub-category Conditional - wordpress

Question

I'm trying to develop two different templates; one layout for a category listing, and a separate layout for subcategories.
I believe it'd require a conditional statement detecting if the current category is a category or subcategory.
I'm familiar with:
<?php if (is_category('Category A')) : ?>
<p>This is the text to describe category A</p>
<?php elseif (is_category('Category B')) : ?>
<p>This is the text to describe category B</p>
<?php else : ?>
<p>This is some generic text to describe all other category pages,
I could be left blank</p>
<?php endif; ?>
But I need this to be more dynamic and handle any category or subcategory without hard coding the cat ID number.
Any help would be appreciated, thank you in advance.

Answer 1

You can use get_category() (WordPress Codex) to get all information about a category. Using this, you could create a custom conditional function in your functions.php like this:
function is_subcategory ($catid) {
$currentcat = get_category($catid);
if ( $currentcat->parent ) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
}
Now you could use this function, to determine if a category has a parent category, and therefore is a subcategory.
Unfortunately I don't know the context of your posted code. You'll somehow need to get the category id. Do you use the loop the walk the categories or a custom sql-query?
If the answer is not helping, maybe you could add some surrounding code to your question.