Determine the category that an archive-page is for

Question

On a category archive page, how do I determine what category the archive page is for? I need either the id or the slug of the category.

I am not looking for get_the_category(). This will give me all categories of the posts on this page (which can be subcategories of the category that the page is for). Instead, I want the category that the archive page is for. How can I get this category?

Answer 1

the ID of the current category will be available in the cat query var:

get_query_var('cat');