The read-only childNodes
property of the Node
interface returns a live NodeList
of child nodes
of the given element where the first child node is assigned index 0
. Child nodes include elements, text and comments.
Note: The NodeList
being live means that its content is changed each time new children are added or removed.
Browsers insert text nodes into a document to represent whitespace in the source markup. Therefore a node obtained, for example, using Node.childNodes[0]
may refer to a whitespace text node rather than the actual element the author intended to get.
See Whitespace in the DOM for more information.
The items in the collection of nodes are objects, not strings. To get data from node objects, use their properties. For example, to get the name of the first childNode, you can use elementNodeReference.childNodes[0].nodeName
.
The document
object itself has two children: the Doctype declaration and the root element, typically referred to as documentElement
. In HTML documents the latter is the <html>
element.
It is important to keep in mind that childNodes
includes all child nodes, including non-element nodes like text and comment. To get a collection containing only elements, use Element.children
instead.