Displaying a posts current category and parent category only

Since WordPress doesn’t allow for limiting the category in “the_category” I had to write some custom code to achieve limiting the categories displayed for the current post to the current category and it’s parent.

<?php //display the current and parent category (2 total)
$category = get_the_category();
$current_category = $category[0];
$parent_category = $current_category->category_parent;
if ( $parent_category != 0 ) {
echo '<a href="' . get_category_link($parent_category) . '">' . get_cat_name($parent_category) . '</a>';
}
echo '<a href="' . get_category_link($current_category) . '">' . $current_category->cat_name . '</a>';
?>

props: Nick