How can I tell what category I'm in?

Question

When displaying a category how can I tell what category it is? Say I'm on http://www.example.com/category/quotes, how can I get quotes aside from parsing the URL? I tried get_the_category() but it returns an array of all the categories of the first post shown in the page.

Answer 1

This should get you category object with ID, slug and rest of info:

$wp_query->get_queried_object();

Answer 2

You can get the category name with:

single_cat_title();

Reference: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/single_cat_title