How to delete all categories programatically?

Question

Simple questions - how do I delete all categories programatically?

For instance this returns a list of all categories

$args = array(  
    "hide_empty" => 0,
    "type"       => "post",
    "orderby"    => "name",
    "order"      => "ASC" 
);
$types = get_categories($args);

How do I simply delete them so I can replace them with other categories?

Answer 1

Please have look on the below code block-

$args = array(
    "hide_empty" => 0,
    "type"       => "post",
    "orderby"    => "name",
    "order"      => "ASC"
);
$types = get_categories($args);

foreach ( $types as $type) {
    wp_delete_category( $type->ID );
}

The function wp_delete_category will delete a single category. So we need to run a loop through $types to delete each single category.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

$cats = get_categories( [
    'hide_empty'   => 0
] );
foreach( $cats as $cat ) {
    wp_delete_category( $cat->term_id );
}