Woocommerce get the Archive/Category slug of the current category page

Question

I want to get the slug of the current archive page. I have a slider where I want to echo the products that are in this category. After hours this is all I have and it doesn't work...

<?php 

if ( is_single() ) {
    $cats =  get_the_category();
    $cat = $cats[0]; // let's just assume the post has one category
}
else { // category archives
    $cat = get_category( get_query_var( 'cat' ) );
}
$cat_name = $cat->name;
$cat_slug = $cat->slug;

echo '<h2 style="text-align:center;">'.$cat_name.' - Spotlight</h2>';
echo '<h2 style="text-align:center;">'.$cat_slug.' -- Slug</h2>';

echo "here: ".$cat_name." - ".$cat_slug;

echo do_shortcode('[wpb-product-slider title="" product_type="category" category="'.$cat_slug.'" items="3" items_desktop="3" items_desktop_small="3" items_tablet="2" items_mobile="1" width="320" height="300" crop="true" theme="ben-box" posts="50" orderby="rand" speed="2000" order="ASC"]'); ?>

But the $cat is always empty. How can I do that ?

Answer 1

If you are working in the "archive.php" template, you could try this code:

global $post; //maybe not needed

$category = get_the_category($post->ID);
$slug = $category[0]->slug; // try print_r($category); to see everything

echo $slug;

Answer 2

What worked for me was:

$current_category = get_queried_object(); 
$current_category_slug = $current_category->slug;

I hope this might help someone, it took me way too much time to figure this out.