Get the first post term

How do I get only the first term of a custom post type.
I can get all – no problem. This what I am using to grab all of them

<?php foreach ($terms as $term) {echo '<a href="'.get_term_link($term->slug, 'sitecat').'" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">'.$term->name.'</a>,';} ?> >> <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"><?php the_title('', ''); ?></a></h2></span>

Would appreciate an answer using my code but any help is most welcomed

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘first’ taxonomy… but,

$terms = get_the_terms( $post->ID, 'mytaxonomy' );

returns an array of taxonomy term objects, so

$term = array_pop($terms);

Would give you the first term in the array. And then:

echo '<a href="'.get_term_link($term->slug, 'mytaxonomy').'" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">'.$term->name.'</a>,'

(You may want to include some if statements, in case an empty array or error is returned (see is_wp_error)

Method 2

As of PHP 5.4, you can directly dereference an array, so to get the first term, you can simply do.

$first_term = get_the_terms( $post->ID, 'TAXONOMY_NAME' )[0];
var_dump( $first_term );

If you need a specific property (say the term name) of the first term, you can do the following

$first_term_name = get_the_terms( $post->ID, 'TAXONOMY_NAME' )[0]->name;
var_dump( $first_term_name );

EDIT

Just a note, this does have its draw backs because you will get a WP_Error object if the taxonomy is invalid. Also, if the returned array is empty, you will also get an undefined array key warning, so use this with with care.

Method 3

how about directly access the key of object?

$terms = get_the_terms( $post->ID, 'sitecat' );
$first_term = $terms[0];

so you can access the object.

echo $first_term->name;

Method 4

To summarize all the previous answers here is the helper gist I use. Does all the necessary checks and accepts same arguments as the get_the_terms() function.

function getTheFirstTerm($post, $taxonomy) {
    $post = get_post( $post );
    if ( ! $post ) {
        return false;
    }

    $terms = get_the_terms( $post->ID, $taxonomy );

    if (!empty($terms)  && !is_wp_error( $terms )) {
        //this line effectively returns the first available term object if there is one.
        return $terms[0];
    }

    return false;
}

Further note.
This function for simplicity that’s needed in most of my cases just returns the term object or false. You can still return WP_Error if up the flow you need check for it i.e.

if (!empty($terms)) {
   if(!is_wp_error( $terms )) {
       //this line effectively returns the first available term object if there is one.
       return $terms[0];
   } else {
       return $terms; //This returns the WP_Error object
   }       
}

Moreover you can sort the terms before returning the first i.e. so you get first term object by term_id, slug, name, menu order and so on.

Method 5

It worked for me. It brings only the first category as text, no anchor.

$terms = get_the_terms( $post->ID , 'your_custom_taxonomy' ); 
foreach( $terms as $term ) { 
    print $term->name;
    break;
    unset($term);
}

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