Get A List Of Registered Actions In WordPress

WordPress actions and filters is an event driven architecture that allow you to run specific code at certain times in your application. To do this WordPress uses two functions the add_action() to add new callback functions to an action, and the do_action() function which will run all the callback functions assigned to this action.

In a recent project I was testing some code that used AJAX to run an action in a WordPress plugin. The problem I was having was that this action wasn't being called when it should of been, because this was using AJAX I needed a way of finding out if the code that add the action was actually being ran.

So I needed a way of finding out if the action I add was registered with WordPress so it understood what code to run on this action.

Whenever you want to add an action to WordPress you need to use the function add_action(), the code underneath this will add a new element to an array called $wp_filter.

Then if you look at the function that runs the actions do_action() function this will search for the action in the same $wp_filter variable. Which means all the registered actions will be added to this array, so if you want to view what actions have been registered at a certain time in your code you simply have to print out the elements in this array.

global $wp_filter;

echo '<pre>';
print_r($wp_filter);
echo '</pre>';