How to know how many parents for a specific category?

Question

In WordPress is there a way where we can know the number of parents categories of a current category:

-Parent 1
 -Parent 2
   - Parent 3
    - Current Category

So the function can tell me that the current category has 3 parents.

Answer 1

get_category_parents in wp-includes/category-template.php returns a string containing all parents listed as:

Parent 1:seperator:Parent 2:seperator:Parent 3:seperator:Current Category

So it is possible to get the number of parent categories in the following way:

$ number_of_parents = sizeof(explode(', ', (get_category_parents($category_id, TRUE, ', ')))) - 1;

There might be a better/more efficient way of doing this though. But if maximum performance is not that important, the above should be good enough.