strip last comma from get_the_category

foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
    echo $category->cat_name . ', ';

}

So I’m echoing it like this because I don’t want the categories to appear as hyperlinks, I just want the cat names.

The problem is I can’t get rid of the last separator so it ends up like : category, category, category,

I tried ‘stripping’ it (php seriously confuses me small design mind)

foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
    echo $category->cat_name . ', ';
    echo rtrim($category, ", ");
}

That didn’t trim it though.

Answers:

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Method 1

There are two ways to solve this issue. You need a clean array of category names for both, so let’s start with that:

$cat_names = wp_list_pluck( get_the_category(), 'cat_name');

$cat_names is now an array with just the names:

Array
(
    [0] => aciform
    [1] => Cat A
    [2] => Cat B
    [3] => Cat C
    [4] => sub
)

Now you can use the simple way:

echo join( ', ', $cat_names );

Result: aciform, Cat A, Cat B, Cat C, sub

But my recommendation is to use the grammatically correct list, use wp_sprintf_l():

echo wp_sprintf_l( '%l', $cat_names );

Result: aciform, Cat A, Cat B, Cat C, and sub

wp_sprintf_l() will use a localized separator for the last two items, so in a German site this would output: aciform, Cat A, Cat B, Cat C und sub.

And you don’t even have to care about the correct translation – the proper separator is part of the regular language files.

Method 2

There’s another way to do this using CSS and a pseudo selector to add the commas. You would just need to wrap each category in an HTML tag eg:

foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
    echo '<span class="category">' . $category->cat_name . '<span>';
}

And then with CSS:

.category:not(:last-child)::after {
    content: ",";
}

EDIT: This solution will only work in browsers that support these pseudo selectors (IE 9 and up)

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0