Display Taxonomy field from within Group

• daveoudshoorn

• March 18, 2020 at 1:10 am

Hi there,

I’m using the ACF fields Group (“team”), and within that are various fields for taxonomies selection (“director”, “artist” etc.).

My front-end output should be something like:

Director: term1, term2, term3
Artist: term1, term5, term33

Currently I’m using the taxonomy to return an object, then using print_r to display the entire Director array:

print_r($team['Director');

Output

Array
(
    [0] => WP_Term Object
        (
            [term_id] => 157
            [name] => John Doe
            [slug] => john-doe
            [term_group] => 0
            [term_taxonomy_id] => 157
            [taxonomy] => team
            [description] => 
            [parent] => 0
            [count] => 2
            [filter] => raw
        )

    [1] => WP_Term Object
        (
            [term_id] => 101
            [name] => Franz Hansen
            [slug] => franz-hansen
            [term_group] => 0
            [term_taxonomy_id] => 101
            [taxonomy] => team
            [description] => 
            [parent] => 0
            [count] => 2
            [filter] => raw
        )

    [2] => WP_Term Object
        (
            [term_id] => 105
            [name] => Jan Jansen
            [slug] => janjansen
            [term_group] => 0
            [term_taxonomy_id] => 105
            [taxonomy] => team
            [description] => 
            [parent] => 0
            [count] => 2
            [filter] => raw
        )
)

How do I turn this into:

Director: John Doe, Franz Hansen, Jan Jansen

Thanks in advance!

• speakincode

• March 20, 2020 at 6:24 am

There are many ways to accomplish this, here’s one that will also put a comma after each name, except the final name.

// Loop through all directors
foreach ($team['Director'] as $director) {

    // Build an array of just the director names
    $names[] = $director["name"];

}

// Display a comma separated list of the names 
echo implode(", ", $names);

Hope that helps!

• daveoudshoorn

• March 20, 2020 at 9:46 pm

Hi @speakincode, thank you for your help!

I’ve been bashing my head at it for hours yesterday. Your code throws a fatal error:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Cannot use object of type WP_Term as array in ...

What eventually seemed to work was this. Don’t know if it’s very elegant PHP…

$directorArray = $team['Director'];
$commaArray = $director->name;
$commaArray = array();
foreach ($directorArray as $director){ 
    $commaArray[] = '<span>'.$director->name.'</span>';
}
echo implode( ', ', $commaArray );

• speakincode

• March 21, 2020 at 3:58 am

Whoops! Sorry, I mistook each $director in $team['Directors'] to be an array when each is actually an object. So our solutions are actually the same, except yours is using the proper syntax for a property on an object $director->name, where I was using the syntax for a property on an array $director['name']. I hope my mistake didn’t cost ya too much time, sorry about that.

I hope that clarifies though why one works now and the other threw an error. Also, your code looks just great, but you don’t need the $commaArray = $director->name; line.

I’m glad you got it worked out!

• daveoudshoorn

• March 23, 2020 at 11:17 pm

No worries, my bashing my head was before your solution popped up 🙂

I’m not too familiar with PHP and arrays/objects, so the solution was indeed to realise if I was working with arrays or objects, or objects inside arrays.

Thanks for helping out!