Get Parent Category from Child Category

**Andrea Barghigiani** · 12-21-2010, 12:55 PM

Hi guys,

really how do you do this?!?

Let me explain a bit better my issue here, on my WP installation I've got several categories (300+ categories inside of my database) and I was trying to give to each one of them a proper RSS Feed.
Basically the structure of my categories is as follow:

Code:

parent category
    child category
    child category
         grandchild category
    child category
parent category
    child category
        grandchild category
    child category

... and so on

Now I've read on the help of FeedBurner, and it says that I shall create a new feed for each category. So I am sure now you can see my problem, I do noto want to create a single RSS Feed for each of my category, so I've created an RSS Feed for each parent category and now comes my problem.

I would like to display a link to the parent category for each children and grandchild categories so to find out the ancestor of the whole category system and I came up with this solution:

Code:

function parentCat( $cat ){
          $result;
          if( $cat->parent == 0 ){
            $result = $cat;
          } else{
            $result = get_term_by('id', $cat->parent, 'ad_cat');
            parentCat( $result );
          } 
          return $result;
}
//Variable to get the term object of the category
$term = get_term_by('id', 'category_id', 'taxonomy_name');

$test = parentCat( $term );

As you can see this is a simple function that's supposed to run until the value of the category parent is set to 0; in this case the current category is a parent category!

But instead to run the function untill it finds out the straight parent of the category, that in some cases is not the category with a parent value set at 0...

Does anyone have an idea of how to find the anchestor category???

Thanks in advance for the help!!