Output the text before category

Question

I need to output the text before the_category.

In result, it should be something like

Posted on September 20, 2014 IN MyCategory

Here I use the_time('F j, Y') and start from here I use the_category().

Word "in" should be inside the_category and before words "MyCategory".

For example, for the_date I can use $before to place text before the_date.

Here I need to do the same for the_category(), but I can't get this to work.

Any suggestions on how to solve this issue?

Answer 1

I don't see why you can not use plain text like tho

Posted on <?php the_time('F j, Y') ?> in <?php the_category(); ?>

If what you are asking is really important, just wrap the function like this

my_custom_category($before='',$after=''){
echo $before;
the_category()
$echo $after;
}

If the_category is not picking the post ID, then pass it manually.

Answer 2

You can create custom function for displaying any kind of terms.

By terms I mean categories and tags, and by any kind I mean both regular and custom post types terms.

In that function you can add some kind of $text_before parameter, which you can use to add text before your category list, which will be displayed conditionally, only if your function is returning something, which I am assuming you want to achieve - avoid displaying "before" text if there are no categories selected for the post item. Am I right?

Function could look like this:

function mytheme_get_terms ($postID, $term, $text_before = "") {

    $terms_list = wp_get_post_terms($postID, $term);
    $output = '';

    $i = 0;
    foreach( $terms_list as $term) {
        $i++;
        if($i == 1){$output .= $prefix;}
        if($i > 1){$output .= ', ';}
        $output .= '<a href="' . get_term_link($term) . '">'. $term->name .'</a>';
    }

    return $output;
}

and you can call it like this:

<?php echo mytheme_get_terms($post->ID, 'category', 'IN'); ?>