WordPress: Get Category ID for a Category Page

It shouldn’t be this hard!!  Here is a quick function for getting the Category ID for a WordPress Category Page. Once you get the Category ID, a world of possbilities opens up. You can get the category object and all the info you need related to that Cat.  I can’t believe how hard it was to find this on Google. Ultimately, I had to piece together a couple of different posts to get to this since they weren’t quite right.

If you’ve got a better way of getting this…please share! Here’s what I came up with:

function getCurrentCatID(){
  global $wp_query;
  if(is_category() || is_single()){
$cat_ID = get_query_var('cat');
  }
  return $cat_ID;
 }

//To get the full category object, try this:
$cat = get_category(get_query_var('cat'),false);

Uggg…that shouldn’t have been so hard to find. Big ‘G’, you treated me bad!

[Follow-up] – as Steve notes below, try get_the_category() and see if that does what you need before implementing the function above.   Thanks, Steve! 

Cheers,
Byron