[css] CSS '>' selector; what is it?

I've seen the "greater than" (>) used in CSS code a few times, but I can't work out what it does. What does it do?

This question is related to css css-selectors

The answer is


> selects all direct descendants/children

A space selector will select all deep descendants whereas a greater than > selector will only select all immediate descendants. See fiddle for example.

_x000D_
_x000D_
div { border: 1px solid black; margin-bottom: 10px; }_x000D_
.a b { color: red; } /* every John is red */_x000D_
.b > b { color: blue; } /* Only John 3 and John 4 are blue */
_x000D_
<div class="a">_x000D_
  <p><b>John 1</b></p>_x000D_
  <p><b>John 2</b></p>_x000D_
  <b>John 3</b>_x000D_
  <b>John 4</b>_x000D_
</div>_x000D_
_x000D_
<div class="b">_x000D_
  <p><b>John 1</b></p>_x000D_
  <p><b>John 2</b></p>_x000D_
  <b>John 3</b>_x000D_
  <b>John 4</b>_x000D_
</div>
_x000D_
_x000D_
_x000D_


As others have said, it's a direct child, but it's worth noting that this is different to just leaving a space... a space is for any descendant.

<div>
  <span>Some text</span>
</div>

div>span would match this, but it would not match this:

<div>
  <p><span>Some text</span></p>
</div>

To match that, you could do div>p>span or div span.


It means parent/child

example:

html>body

that's saying that body is a child of html

Check out: Selectors


It is the CSS child selector. Example:

div > p selects all paragraphs that are direct children of div.

See this


It is a Child Selector.

It matches when an element is the child of some element. It is made up of two or more selectors separated by ">".

Example(s):

The following rule sets the style of all P elements that are children of BODY:

body > P { line-height: 1.3 }

Example(s):

The following example combines descendant selectors and child selectors:

div ol>li p

It matches a P element that is a descendant of an LI; the LI element must be the child of an OL element; the OL element must be a descendant of a DIV. Notice that the optional white space around the ">" combinator has been left out.


It declares parent reference, look at this page for definition:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html#child-selectors