How to get role of user

Question

I need to get the role associated with a user -- not the "currently logged in user".

I am using Buddypress (not that should matter to the nature of this question) and I am in the bp_members() loop.

How can I retrieve the role of the user I am reporting on in the loop at any given time?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Use the user ID and WP_User:

$user = new WP_User( $user_id );
print wp_sprintf_l( '%l', $user->roles );

Update

/**
 * Get user roles by user ID.
 *
 * @param  int $id
 * @return array
 */
function wpse_58916_user_roles_by_id( $id )
{
    $user = new WP_User( $id );

    if ( empty ( $user->roles ) or ! is_array( $user->roles ) )
        return array ();

    $wp_roles = new WP_Roles;
    $names    = $wp_roles->get_names();
    $out      = array ();

    foreach ( $user->roles as $role )
    {
        if ( isset ( $names[ $role ] ) )
            $out[ $role ] = $names[ $role ];
    }

    return $out;
}

Usage example:

print '<pre>' 
    . htmlspecialchars( 
        print_r( wpse_58916_user_roles_by_id(1), TRUE ) 
        ) 
    . '</pre>';

Array
(
    [administrator] => Administrator
)

Answer 2

If bp_members returns an array of WP_User objects, each should have a the property roles that contains an array of the users roles.

Otherwise, you can use get_user_meta for the key wp_capabilities, which will return an array of role => capability pairs:

<?php
$caps = get_user_meta($user->ID, 'wp_capabilities', true);
$roles = array_keys((array)$caps);

Answer 3

As I understand, it probably changed over the years, now it's not 'wp_capabilities'. I looked at the core WP files, how they do it now, and found a new solution to this. Here's the code I use now:

global $wpdb;
$cap = get_user_meta( $wp_user_id, $wpdb->get_blog_prefix() . 'capabilities', true );

$cap then comes as an associative array, for example:

{
    "administrator": true
}

or

{
    "subscriber": true
}

So in your case you should probably then get the keys of the array:

$caps_array = array_keys( $cap );

and then get everything from it. I needed to see if the user has the administrator role, so I checked:

if ( is_array( $cap ) && !empty( $cap['administrator'] ) ) { return true; }

I had a user ID, not the whole WP_User object, and I didn't want to use any solution that would create the user object. As I checked, get_user_meta goes straight to the db to check for this exact parameter, so this should be the fastest and resource-wise route.