Get user ID in every situation

WordPress offers a number of options to obtain the user ID. There are various options depending on the situation. There are 3 types of situations:

  • A list of users
  • The current logged-in user
  • A specific user

A list of users

When iterating over a list of users it is pretty simple to obtain the ID of each user because the get_users() function returns objects including all user data.

$users = get_users( $args );
foreach ( $users as $user ) {
   echo $user->ID;
}  

The current logged-in user

To obtain the user ID of the current logged in user I use the following code:

$user_id = get_current_user_id();

A specific user

To obtain the user ID of a specific user we need some other user data of the user. For example an e-mail address or login name.

$user = get_user_by( 'email', 'user@example.com' );
$user_id = $user->ID;

Robbert Vermeulen

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