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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();
});
Try it Yourself »

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");
});
Try it Yourself »


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");
});
Try it Yourself »

The following example returns all descendants of <div>:

Example

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("div").find("*");
});
Try it Yourself »

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.