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:

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>:

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>:

The following example returns all descendants of <div>: