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:

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:

$(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>:

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

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>:

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

The following example returns all descendants of <div>:

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

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