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Document: children property

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

For HTML documents, this is usually only the root <html> element.

See Element.children for child elements of specific HTML elements within the document.

Value

An HTMLCollection which is a live, ordered collection of the DOM elements which are children of the current document. 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 document has no element children, then children is an empty list with a length of 0.

Examples

js

document.children;
// HTMLCollection [<html>]
// Usually only contains the root <html> element, the document's only direct child

See Element.children for child elements of specific HTML elements within the document.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Internet Explorer Opera Safari WebView Android Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet
children 29 16 25 No 16 9 4.4 29 25 16 9 2.0

See also

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https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/children