Element.children

The read-only children property returns a live HTMLCollection which contains all of the child elements of the element upon which it was called.

Element.children includes only element nodes. To get all child nodes, including non-element nodes like text and comment nodes, use Node.childNodes.

Syntax

// Getter
collection = myElement.children;

// No setter; read-only property

Return value

An HTMLCollection which is a live, ordered collection of the DOM elements which are children of node. You can access the individual child nodes in the collection by using either the item() method on the collection, or by using JavaScript array-style notation.

If the element has no element children, then children is an empty list with a length of 0.

Example

const myElement = document.getElementById('foo');
for (let i = 0; i < myElement.children.length; i++) {
  console.log(myElement.children[i].tagName);
}

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• Node.childNodes