Node.childNodes
The Node.childNodes
read-only property returns a live collection of child nodes of the given element.
Syntax
var <var>ndList</var> = elementNodeReference.childNodes;
ndList is an ordered collection of node objects that are children of the current element. If the element has no children, then ndList contains no node.
The ndList is a variable storing the node list of childNodes. Such list is of type NodeList
.
Example
// parg is an object reference to a <p> element if (parg.hasChildNodes()) { // So, first we check if the object is not empty, if the object has child nodes var children = parg.childNodes; for (var i = 0; i < children.length; i++) { // do something with each child as children[i] // NOTE: List is live, Adding or removing children will change the list } }
// This is one way to remove all children from a node // box is an object reference to an element with children while (box.firstChild) { //The list is LIVE so it will re-index each call box.removeChild(box.firstChild); }
Notes
The items in the collection of nodes are objects and not strings. To get data from those node objects, you must use their properties (e.g. elementNodeReference.childNodes[1].nodeName
to get the name, etc.).
The document
object itself has 2 children: the Doctype declaration and the root element, typically referred to as documentElement
. (In (X)HTML documents this is the HTML
element.)
childNodes
also includes e.g. text nodes and comments. To skip them, use ParentNode.children
instead.
Specification
See also
License
© 2016 Mozilla Contributors
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-us/docs/web/api/node/childnodes