Get magento category id by category path

Question

So I am adding products programmatically, in my csv I have the category path which would look like,

Clothing/Shirts/Sweaters

Now using this how do I look up the category id? As far as I know the only way to assign a product a category is using,

->setCategoryIds(array(1));

Pulling the data from the database looks very tedious, as my above example is three sub categories deep. Is there a builtin Magento function that will make this possible?

Answer 1

You can read it from the core_url_rewrite table, giving request path as "clothing/shirts/sweaters.html". (Replace space with hyphen like "clothing/t-shirts/sweaters.html") You may have to do that recursively to reach the direct path to category though.

The right way though is to read all categories using helper class, and then search within it for the required category. This answer gives some information on how to do it.

Answer 2

There is a snippet for that, you could make it a helper since helper is singleton pattern and finder _initCategories will run just once:

https://gist.github.com/jzahedieh/6884204

public function getIdFromPath($string)
{
    if (in_array($string, array_keys($this->_categories))) {
        return $this->_categories[$string];
    }
    return false;
}

protected function _initCategories()
{
    $collection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/category_collection')->addNameToResult();
    /* @var $collection Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Eav_Mysql4_Category_Collection */
    foreach ($collection as $category) {
        $structure = explode('/', $category->getPath());
        $pathSize = count($structure);
        if ($pathSize > 1) {
            $path = array();
            for ($i = 1; $i < $pathSize; $i++) {
                $path[] = $collection->getItemById($structure[$i])->getName();
            }
            $rootCategoryName = array_shift($path);
            if (!isset($this->_categoriesWithRoots[$rootCategoryName])) {
                $this->_categoriesWithRoots[$rootCategoryName] = array();
            }
            $index = implode('/', $path);
            $this->_categoriesWithRoots[$rootCategoryName][$index] = $category->getId();
            if ($pathSize > 2) {
                $this->_categories[$index] = $category->getId();
            }
        }
    }
    return $this;
}