The DOM: Remove children elements

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Given an item in the DOM, use querySelector() to identify it, like this:

const item = document.querySelector('#itemId')

then, to remove all its children elements, you have a few different solutions.

The fastest way looks like this:

item.innerHTML = ''

Another solution that is suggested is this: create a loop, check if the firstChild property is defined (the element has at least a child) and then remove it:

const item = document.querySelector('#itemId')
while (item.firstChild) {
  item.removeChild(item.firstChild)
}

The loop ends when all children are removed.

The first, in most performance benchmarks I checked, looks to be the fastest solution.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: The `window` object
2: The `document` object
3: Types of nodes
4: Traversing the DOM
5: Editing the DOM
6: Selectors API
7: DOM Ready
8: Add a class to an element
9: Remove a class from an element
10: Check if element has a class
11: Change a DOM node value
12: Loop through DOM elements
13: Add an image to the DOM
14: Create a DOM attribute
15: ▶︎ Remove children elements
16: Replace a DOM element
17: insertAdjacentHTML
18: Add click events to a list