Need to check is_archive during init

Question

I need to check if a page is an archive or not, before my plugin does some URI manipulations. These manipulations only work before wp but if I perform them first and then check is_archive, the check will always return false.

How can I check is_archive (or achieve the same end result) during a pre-wp hook?

It would be great if we could pass is_archive a postid to check, but it doesn't work that way.

EDIT: I realize perhaps I'm explaining myself poorly, as archives don't even HAVE postids, as far as I know. I just need some way to check if the current URI is an archive or not, before wp fires.

EDIT: On further experimenting, it appears that my URI manipulations can't take place any later than init, I think because by that point WP has already done its rewriting and such. So, I either need a way to check for an archive page status, within init, or do URI rewriting after init, either approach is fine with me as long as it gets the intended result.

Answer 1

This is what I could come up with, within init like you said ! Even if you print the $GLOBALS array, there is no way to check if the current page is an archive, is_archive is also set to blank! But if you check the $_GET array, the q variable contains the current archive type being displayed. Using this I came up with a hack, I cannot guarantee you if it will work always! But you can try something around this!

<?php

    add_action('init', 'q');

    function q()
    {
        //echo '<pre>';
        //print_r($_GET);
        //echo '</pre>';

        $q = $_GET['q'];

        //Here you can substitute other 'archive' terms, say 'author', 'date' or '<custom taxonomy name>'. Use a switch case or nested if-else to check all the archive terms in your environment!
        $pos = strpos($q, 'category');
        if($pos !== false )
            echo "CATEGORY ARCHIVE";
    }

Hope this one works!