get_term_by() │ WP 2.3.0

Examples to get terms by name and taxonomy type (taxonomy_name as category, post_tag or custom taxonomy).

// Let's get the "News" category by its name:
$term = get_term_by('name', 'News', 'category' );

// Get tags (post_tag taxonomy) by slug
$term = get_term_by( 'slug', 'my-tag-name', 'post_tag' );

// Get the term "News" from the taxonomy "my_custom_taxonomy" by its name:
$term = get_term_by( 'name', 'News', 'my_custom_taxonomy' );

// Retrieve a term by its id (term_id) from the taxonomy `category`.
get_term_by( 'id', 12, 'category' )

As a result of these examples, the variable $term will contain such an object:

stdClass Object
(
	[term_id] => 80
	[name] => My Category
	[slug] => my-category
	[term_group] => 0
	[term_taxonomy_id] => 87
	[taxonomy] => my_tax
	[description] =>
	[parent] => 0
	[count] => 5
)

This example shows how to get all the data of the first post category, using this function:

global $post;

// get all categories of the current post
$post_cats = get_the_category( $post->ID );

// collect data about all post categories in $cats_data
foreach ( $post_cats as $post_cat ) {
	$cats_data[] = get_term_by( 'id', $post_cat->cat_ID, 'category' );
}
// here $cats_data contains the data of all post categories

The first category of the post can be obtained as follows:

$first_cat = get_term_by( 'id', $post_cats[0]->cat_ID, 'category' );

This is a demo example. The idea is that get_the_category() returns an array with all category data and, for example, the first category data will be in the first element of the array: $post_cats[0].

Because of core changes from v4.1 – 4.3, it’s now possible for multiple terms to match the supplied name or slug parameters.

The WP_Term Object returned will be the first matching term found by mySQL, there is no indication that other matching terms may exist. If there is any possibility of multiple terms having the same name or slug in your application, you should use get_terms() instead of get_term_by().

If you are using a custom taxonomy, this might not work unless you add the third parameter - taxonomy name:

My custom taxonomy is wpdocs_playlist.

$playlist = get_term_by( 'slug', $playlist_key, 'wpdocs_playlist' );