jQuery Descendants

jQuery Traversing - Descendants

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A descendant is a child, grandchild, great-grandchild, and so on.

With jQuery you can traverse down the DOM tree to find descendants of an element.

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Traversing Down the DOM Tree

Two useful jQuery methods for traversing down the DOM tree are:

• children()
• find()

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jQuery children() Method

The children() method returns all direct children of the selected element.
This method only traverse a single level down the DOM tree.
The following example returns all elements that are direct children of each <div> elements:

Example

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("div").children();
});

You can also use an optional parameter to filter the search for children.
The following example returns all <p> elements with the class name "first", that are direct children of <div>:

Example

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("div").children("p.first");
});

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jQuery find() Method

The find() method returns descendant elements of the selected element, all the way down to the last descendant.
The following example returns all <span> elements that are descendants of <div>:

Example

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("div").find("span");
});

The following example returns all descendants of <div>:

Example

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("div").find("*");
});

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