category not showing

[nofel]

Hi,
I am working on a site, in which the_title,the_permalink etc are working but when i put the_category() it doesn't work. whereas i have categories on back end and they all post r listed in the category.
pls help

 <a href="<?php the_permalink();  the_category(); ?>">

[bo5ton]

Hi,
I am working on a site, in which the_title,the_permalink etc are working but when i put the_category() it doesn't work. whereas i have categories on back end and they all post r listed in the category.
pls help

 <a href="<?php the_permalink();  the_category(); ?>">

I can see that this should work if you do actually have 'content' in your anchor tag - i.e does it look like this:

 <a href="<?php the_permalink();  the_category(); ?>">Categories</a>

What does the entire line look like?