How to check if a user is in a specific role?

Question

I have a pretty specific requirement to show different text in a field label on the user profile page based on the current user's role. I can't seem to figure out how to check whether the current use is an "author".

I am looking for a function like:

is_user_in_role($user, "author");

I imagine this is pretty simple, but I have searched for too long without an answer so I thought I would post it here.

Answer 1

If you only need this for current user current_user_can() accepts both roles and capabilities.

Answer 2

I was looking for a way to get a user's role using the user's id. Here is what I came up with:

function wp_get_user_roles_by_user_id( $user_id ) {
    $user = get_userdata( $user_id );
    return empty( $user ) ? array() : $user->roles;
}