Wordpress showing wrong category name

Question

I'm using:

$category = get_the_category();
echo $category[0]->cat_name;

to display the current category as a header in an archive template (example of local url is http://imac.local:5757/category/accommodation/, http://imac.local:5757/category/service/ etc)

For the first 3 categories, this works fine, but after that it's showing a child category instead. I've tried changing the slug of the posts and the category, updating the permalinks, unpublishing posts in the child category which is showing (it then shows another child category instead) - but none of this solves the problem.

I suppose it's a clash of slugs & permalinks somewhere, but changing these doesn't seem to fix it. Is there more specific wordpress php which can be written to avoid this clashing?

I did find this post: Archived Posts in Wrong Category but it doesn't seem to be the same problem.

Thanks

Answer 1

As far a I can understand you need to display the category name for the current page when viewing a category page.

You can make use of the query variables to retrieve the category name, for example:

$category = get_queried_object('cat'); 
echo $category->name;

EDIT

A global check to see what is returned by the main query for a specific page/template, you can do a var_dump of the main query global, $wp_query. Add the following code inside your template outside of the loop

?><pre><?php var_dump($wp_query); ?></pre><?php 

To check which query variables are available on a template/page, you can do a var_dump of get_queried_object()

$queried_object = get_queried_object();
 var_dump( $queried_object );

Here is also a list of all query variables