Get the Category from the URL in WordPress

This code assumes that there is only one category in the URL. If there are more it will get the first one. If there are multiple categories you could change the number below to get a different category e.g. change 1 to 2.

The example below would echo the category slug onto your page/post/template.

<?php
//GET CATEGORY FROM URL
//parse url, explode by / and put into an array
$url_path = parse_url($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], PHP_URL_PATH);			
$url_segments = explode('/', $url_path);

$cat_slug_by_url = $url_segments[1];
$catObj = get_category_by_slug($cat_slug_by_url); 
$category_id = $catObj->term_id;
$category_name = $catObj->name;
$category_slug = $catObj->slug;
$category_count = $catObj->category_count;

echo $category_slug;
?>