how to get immediate parent category from a product

Question

i want to get immediate parent category from a current product, i have refereed

Get a product's parent category even if it is accessed directly

but it doesn't help me to find immediate parent category.

please help me

Thank You in Advance

Answer 1

If you have the product as an object, for this example we say your product object is $product. The following should work:

$product->getCategory()->getParentCategory();

That should return the parent category as an object of Mage_Catalog_Model_Category.

If you don't have the product but say have the product id then the following should be enough to get the product.

$product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->load($product_id);

But note that a product could have more than one category assigned to in.

If you have more than one category per product you can use getCategoryCollection() to get all the categories.

foreach ($product->getCategoryCollection() as $category) {
    $parent_category = $category->getParentCategory();
}