How to Get Comment Details by ID in WordPress

How to get full details of a comment in WordPress?

WordPress has made it pretty easy for developers to work with comment entities after version v4.4.0 release.

With the get_comment function provided by WordPress, you can get a specific comment’s details by ID as an object or array (you can determine it).

This WP_Comment object contains the detail of the requested comment with meaningful labels.

get_comment function syntax

This function gets two optional parameters, $comment and $output.

get_comment($comment = null, $output = OBJECT)

$comment parameter determines the comment you want to retrieve details about. This can be an ID or a WP_Comment object.

The default value for $comment parameter is null. This means it will retrieve the current queried comment’s details from the database if you do not specify the comment you want.

$output parameter will determine the type of returned data from WordPress. Use OBJECT (default), ARRAY_A, or ARRAY_N as the value of this optional parameter.

If the get_comment function did not find any comment with the given ID; it will return null as result.

get_comment Output: WP_Comment object

Look at the WP_Comment object attributes returned by the get_comment function of WordPress, it contains detailed information about the specified comment:

WP_Comment Object
(
	[comment_ID],
	[comment_post_ID],
	[comment_author]
	[comment_author_email]
	[comment_author_url]
	[comment_author_IP]
	[comment_date]
	[comment_date_gmt]
	[comment_content]
	[comment_karma]
	[comment_approved]
	[comment_agent]
	[comment_type]
	[comment_parent]
	[user_id]
)

You can get the actual text for the comment with comment_content attribute of the WP_Comment object. the comment_author contains the author’s name, and comment_date value is the date when this comment was sent to the WP blog post.

Example of getting a WP comment’s detail, using comment ID

In this example, we will retrieve a WordPress comment’s information. We will get the comment’s detail with the ID 1, which we specified in $commentId parameter:

$commentId = 1;
$comment = get_comment($commentId);
if($comment){
	echo "Comment ID: " .$comment->comment_ID." 
";
	echo "Comment Post ID: " .$comment->comment_post_ID." 
";
	echo "Comment Author: " .$comment->comment_author." 
";
	echo "Comment Email: " .$comment->comment_author_email." 
";
	echo "Comment Author URL: " .$comment->comment_author_url." 
";
	echo "Comment Author IP: " .$comment->comment_author_IP." 
";
	echo "Comment Date and time: " .$comment->comment_date." 
";
	echo "Comment Date (GMT): " .$comment->comment_date_gmt." 
";
	echo "Comment Content (most important): " .$comment->comment_content." 
";
	echo "Comment Karma: " .$comment->comment_karma." 
";
	echo "Comment Approval Status: " .$comment->comment_approved." 
";
	echo "Comment Agent: " .$comment->comment_agent." 
";
	echo "Comment Type: " .$comment->comment_type." 
";
	echo "Comment parent (if it's a reply): " .$comment->comment_parent." 
";
	echo "Comment User (if available): " .$comment->user_id." 
";
}
else{
	echo "We did not find any comment with the given ID.";
}