Get Top Parent Category (WordPress)

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There are many times when you need to show or get the top most (root) parent category in WordPress - regardless of how many subcategories you might be deep. I have used this logic for page navigation (highlight the top parent tab) - as well as within some custom loops/sidebar code.

They way to do this:

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. <?php
  2. $parentCatList = get_category_parents($cat,false,',');
  3. $parentCatListArray = split(",",$parentCatList);
  4. $topParentName = $parentCatListArray[0];
  5. $sdacReplace = array(" " => "-", "(" => "", ")" => "");
  6. $topParent = strtolower(strtr($topParentName,$sdacReplace));
  7. ?>

To test this you can simply put it in your header and echo out $topParent and you will see the "slug" of the category.
If you want to see the category name and not necessarily the slug - you can simply echo $topParentName.