using pre_get_posts to exclude

Question

I am trying to use pre_get_posts to exclude categories from posting to the homepage. If I do it like so it works just fine

 $query->set( 'cat', '-13,-7,-19,-12,-24,-21,-14');

that is hard coded in. I am building a custom admin that lists the categories in the admin menu. So now I want to use the id's that get selected in the admin menu. So I have assigned my id's to a variable and when I var_dump the variable, this is what I get

 string(2) "13"
 string(1) "7"
 string(2) "19"
 string(2) "12"
 string(2) "24"
 string(2) "21"
 string(2) "14"

So all those are assigned to the variable $category and so I thought I could do this

 $category = get_option( 'excludecats' );
 foreach( $category as $exclude ){
    $query->set( 'cat', '-'.$exclude );
 }

when I view the source, I expect there to be 1987 lines of code but what I end up with is 3117 lines of code trying to use the foreach to exclude them. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

try to implode $category with "," as a glue. Mentioned code in each foreach run rewtites the cat variable of $query.

$query->set('cat', implode(',', $category));

Answer 2

When you use the pre_get_posts action you have access to alter any of the query_vars using the set method.

According to the codex documentation linked above you can use your array and set it as the value of the 'category__not_in' query_var.

$query->set( 'category__not_in', $category );

Answer 3

This is the final code I went with

 function wpa83038_posts_and_pages_on_home( $query ) {
if ( $query->is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
    $query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'page') );
    //GETTING THE OPTION FROM TEH ADMIN TO EXCLUDE THE BLOG POSTS FROM THE HOMEPAGE.
            //using option tree for the WordPress admin area
    if( function_exists( 'ot_get_option' )){
        $category = ot_get_option( 'excludecats' );

        $exclude = implode(",-",$category);
        $exclude = '-'.$exclude;
        $query->set( 'cat', $exclude);
    }
  }
}