How can I count the number of children?

jquery

Solution

You can use `.length`, like this:

var count = $("ul li").length;

`.length` tells how many matches the selector found, so this counts how many `<li>` under `<ul>` elements you have...if there are sub-children, use `"ul > li"` instead to get only direct children. If you have other `<ul>` elements in your page, just change the selector to match only his one, for example if it has an ID you'd use `"#myListID > li"`.

In other situations where you don't know the child type, you can use the `*` (wildcard) selector, or `.children()`, like this:

var count = $(".parentSelector > *").length;

or:

var count = $(".parentSelector").children().length;

Problem

Original source