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jQuery Traversing Descendants

With jQuery you can traverse down the DOM tree to find descendants of an element.A descendant is a child, grandchild, great-grandchild, and so on

Traversing Down the DOM Tree

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

  • children()
  • find()

    • jQuery children() Method

    The children() method returns all direct children of the selected element.

    This method only traverses 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");
    });

    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("*");
    });

    jQuery Exercises

    Test Yourself With Exercises

    Exercise:

    Use a jQuery method to get all direct children of a <div> element element.

    $("div").();

    Start the Exercise

    jQuery Traversing Reference

    For a complete overview of all jQuery Traversing methods, please go to our jQuery Traversing Reference.

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