[javascript] Remove all child elements of a DOM node in JavaScript

How would I go about removing all of the child elements of a DOM node in JavaScript?

Say I have the following (ugly) HTML:

<p id="foo">
    <span>hello</span>
    <div>world</div>
</p>

And I grab the node I want like so:

var myNode = document.getElementById("foo");

How could I remove the children of foo so that just <p id="foo"></p> is left?

Could I just do:

myNode.childNodes = new Array();

or should I be using some combination of removeElement?

I'd like the answer to be straight up DOM; though extra points if you also provide an answer in jQuery along with the DOM-only answer.

2020 Update - use the replaceChildren() API!

Replacing all children can now be done with the (cross-browser supported) replaceChildren() API:

container.replaceChildren(...arrayOfNewChildren);

This will do both: a) remove all existing children, and b) append all of the given new children, in one operation.

You can also use this same API to just remove existing children, without replacing them:

container.replaceChildren();

This is fully supported in Chrome/Edge 86+, Firefox 78+, and Safari 14+. (Note that the MDN data is currently incorrect for Safari.) It is fully specified behavior. This is likely to be faster than any other proposed method here, since the removal of old children and addition of new children is done a) without requiring innerHTML, and b) in one step instead of multiple.

innerText is the winner! http://jsperf.com/innerhtml-vs-removechild/133. At all previous tests inner dom of parent node were deleted at first iteration and then innerHTML or removeChild where applied to empty div.

Here is what I usually do :

HTMLElement.prototype.empty = function() {
    while (this.firstChild) {
        this.removeChild(this.firstChild);
    }
}

And voila, later on you can empty any dom element with :

anyDom.empty()

with jQuery :

$("#foo").find("*").remove();

The easiest way:

let container = document.getElementById("containerId");
container.innerHTML = "";

 let el = document.querySelector('#el');
 if (el.hasChildNodes()) {
      el.childNodes.forEach(child => el.removeChild(child));
 }

Ecma6 makes it easy and compact

myNode.querySelectorAll('*').forEach( n => n.remove() );

This answers the question, and removes “all child nodes”.

If there are text nodes belonging to myNode they can’t be selected with CSS selectors, in this case we’ve to apply (also):

myNode.textContent = '';

Actually the last one could be the fastest and more effective/efficient solution.

.textContent is more efficient than .innerText and .innerHTML, see: MDN

Just saw someone mention this question in another and thought I would add a method I didn't see yet:

function clear(el) {
    el.parentNode.replaceChild(el.cloneNode(false), el);
}

var myNode = document.getElementById("foo");
clear(myNode);

The clear function is taking the element and using the parent node to replace itself with a copy without it's children. Not much performance gain if the element is sparse but when the element has a bunch of nodes the performance gains are realized.

The fastest...

var removeChilds = function (node) {
    var last;
    while (last = node.lastChild) node.removeChild(last);
};

Thanks to Andrey Lushnikov for his link to jsperf.com (cool site!).

EDIT: to be clear, there is no performance difference in Chrome between firstChild and lastChild. The top answer shows a good solution for performance.

If you only want to have the node without its children you could also make a copy of it like this:

var dupNode = document.getElementById("foo").cloneNode(false);

Depends on what you're trying to achieve.

In response to DanMan, Maarten and Matt. Cloning a node, to set the text is indeed a viable way in my results.

// @param {node} node
// @return {node} empty node
function removeAllChildrenFromNode (node) {
  var shell;
  // do not copy the contents
  shell = node.cloneNode(false);

  if (node.parentNode) {
    node.parentNode.replaceChild(shell, node);
  }

  return shell;
}

// use as such
var myNode = document.getElementById('foo');
myNode = removeAllChildrenFromNode( myNode );

Also this works for nodes not in the dom which return null when trying to access the parentNode. In addition, if you need to be safe a node is empty before adding content this is really helpful. Consider the use case underneath.

// @param {node} node
// @param {string|html} content
// @return {node} node with content only
function refreshContent (node, content) {
  var shell;
  // do not copy the contents
  shell = node.cloneNode(false);

  // use innerHTML or you preffered method
  // depending on what you need
  shell.innerHTML( content );

  if (node.parentNode) {
    node.parentNode.replaceChild(shell, node);
  }

  return shell;
}

// use as such
var myNode = document.getElementById('foo');
myNode = refreshContent( myNode );

I find this method very useful when replacing a string inside an element, if you are not sure what the node will contain, instead of worrying how to clean up the mess, start out fresh.

i saw people doing:

while (el.firstNode) {
    el.removeChild(el.firstNode);
}

then someone said using el.lastNode is faster

however I would think that this is the fastest:

var children = el.childNodes;
for (var i=children.length - 1; i>-1; i--) {
    el.removeNode(children[i]);
}

what do you think?

ps: this topic was a life saver for me. my firefox addon got rejected cuz i used innerHTML. Its been a habit for a long time. then i foudn this. and i actually noticed a speed difference. on load the innerhtml took awhile to update, however going by addElement its instant!

There are couple of options to achieve that:

The fastest ():

while (node.lastChild) {
  node.removeChild(node.lastChild);
}

Alternatives (slower):

while (node.firstChild) {
  node.removeChild(node.firstChild);
}

while (node.hasChildNodes()) {
  node.removeChild(node.lastChild);
}

Benchmark with the suggested options

simple and fast using for loop!!

var myNode = document.getElementById("foo");

    for(var i = myNode.childNodes.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
      myNode.removeChild(myNode.childNodes[i]);
    }

this will not work in <span> tag!

If you want to put something back into that div, the innerHTML is probably better.

My example:

<ul><div id="result"></div></ul>

<script>
  function displayHTML(result){
    var movieLink = document.createElement("li");
    var t = document.createTextNode(result.Title);
    movieLink.appendChild(t);
    outputDiv.appendChild(movieLink);
  }
</script>

If I use the .firstChild or .lastChild method the displayHTML() function doesnt work afterwards, but no problem with the .innerHTML method.

Other ways in jQuery

var foo = $("#foo");
foo.children().remove();
//or
$("*", foo ).remove();
//or
foo.html("");
//or
foo.empty();

elm.replaceChildren()

It's experimental without wide support, but when executed with no params will do what you're asking for, and it's more efficient than looping through each child and removing it. As mentioned already, replacing innerHTML with an empty string will require HTML parsing on the browser's part.

Documentation here.

element.innerHTML = "" (or .textContent) is by far the fastest solution

Most of the answers here are based on flawed tests

For example: https://jsperf.com/innerhtml-vs-removechild/15
This test does not add new children to the element between each iteration. The first iteration will remove the element's contents, and every other iteration will then do nothing. In this case, while (box.lastChild) box.removeChild(box.lastChild) was faster because box.lastChild was null 99% of the time

Here is a proper test: https://jsperf.com/innerhtml-conspiracy

Finally, do not use node.parentNode.replaceChild(node.cloneNode(false), node). This will replace the node with a copy of itself without its children. However, this does not preserve event listeners and breaks any other references to the node.

Use modern Javascript, with remove!

const parent = document.getElementById("foo")
while (parent.firstChild) {
    parent.firstChild.remove()
}

This is a newer way to write node removal in ES5. It is vanilla JS and reads much nicer than relying on parent.

All modern browsers are supported.

Browser Support - 96% Jun 2020

element.textContent = '';

It's like innerText, except standard. It's a bit slower than removeChild(), but it's easier to use and won't make much of a performance difference if you don't have too much stuff to delete.

simply only IE:

parentElement.removeNode(true);

true - means to do deep removal - which means that all child are also removed

Why aren't we following the simplest method here "remove" looped inside while.

const foo = document.querySelector(".foo");
while (foo.firstChild) {
  foo.firstChild.remove();     
}

• Selecting the parent div
• Using "remove" Method inside a While loop for eliminating First child element , until there is none left.

Simplest way of removing the child nodes of a node via Javascript

var myNode = document.getElementById("foo");
while(myNode.hasChildNodes())
{
   myNode.removeChild(myNode.lastChild);
}

This is a pure javascript i am not using jQuery but works in all browser even IE and it is verry simple to understand

   <div id="my_div">
    <p>Paragraph one</p>
    <p>Paragraph two</p>
    <p>Paragraph three</p>
   </div>
   <button id ="my_button>Remove nodes ?</button>

   document.getElementById("my_button").addEventListener("click",function(){

  let parent_node =document.getElemetById("my_div"); //Div which contains paagraphs

  //Let find numbers of child inside the div then remove all
  for(var i =0; i < parent_node.childNodes.length; i++) {
     //To avoid a problem which may happen if there is no childNodes[i] 
     try{
       if(parent_node.childNodes[i]){
         parent_node.removeChild(parent_node.childNodes[i]);
       }
     }catch(e){
     }
  }

})

or you may simpli do this which is a quick way to do

document.getElementById("my_button").addEventListener("click",function(){

 let parent_node =document.getElemetById("my_div");
 parent_node.innerHTML ="";

})

Generally, JavaScript uses arrays to reference lists of DOM nodes. So, this will work nicely if you have an interest in doing it through the HTMLElements array. Also, worth noting, because I am using an array reference instead of JavaScript proto's this should work in any browser, including IE.

while(nodeArray.length !== 0) {
  nodeArray[0].parentNode.removeChild(nodeArray[0]);
}

var myNode = document.getElementById("foo");
var fc = myNode.firstChild;

while( fc ) {
    myNode.removeChild( fc );
    fc = myNode.firstChild;
}

If there's any chance that you have jQuery affected descendants, then you must use some method that will clean up jQuery data.

$('#foo').empty();

The jQuery .empty() method will ensure that any data that jQuery associated with elements being removed will be cleaned up.

If you simply use DOM methods of removing the children, that data will remain.

Here's another approach:

function removeAllChildren(theParent){

    // Create the Range object
    var rangeObj = new Range();

    // Select all of theParent's children
    rangeObj.selectNodeContents(theParent);

    // Delete everything that is selected
    rangeObj.deleteContents();
}

The currently accepted answer is wrong about innerHTML being slower (at least in IE and Chrome), as m93a correctly mentioned.

Chrome and FF are dramatically faster using this method (which will destroy attached jquery data):

var cNode = node.cloneNode(false);
node.parentNode.replaceChild(cNode, node);

in a distant second for FF and Chrome, and fastest in IE:

node.innerHTML = '';

InnerHTML won't destroy your event handlers or break jquery references, it's also recommended as a solution here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.innerHTML.

The fastest DOM manipulation method (still slower than the previous two) is the Range removal, but ranges aren't supported until IE9.

var range = document.createRange();
range.selectNodeContents(node);
range.deleteContents();

The other methods mentioned seem to be comparable, but a lot slower than innerHTML, except for the outlier, jquery (1.1.1 and 3.1.1), which is considerably slower than anything else:

$(node).empty();

Evidence here:

http://jsperf.com/innerhtml-vs-removechild/167 http://jsperf.com/innerhtml-vs-removechild/300 https://jsperf.com/remove-all-child-elements-of-a-dom-node-in-javascript (New url for jsperf reboot because editing the old url isn't working)

Jsperf's "per-test-loop" often gets understood as "per-iteration", and only the first iteration has nodes to remove so the results are meaningless, at time of posting there were tests in this thread set up incorrectly.

Using a range loop feels the most natural to me:

for (var child of node.childNodes) {
    child.remove();
}

According to my measurements in Chrome and Firefox, it is about 1.3x slower. In normal circumstances, this will perhaps not matter.

Functional only approach:

const domChildren = (el) => Array.from(el.childNodes)
const domRemove = (el) => el.parentNode.removeChild(el)
const domEmpty = (el) => domChildren(el).map(domRemove)

"childNodes" in domChildren will give a nodeList of the immediate children elements, which is empty when none are found. In order to map over the nodeList, domChildren converts it to array. domEmpty maps a function domRemove over all elements which removes it.

Example usage:

domEmpty(document.body)

removes all children from the body element.

You can remove all child elements from a container like below:

function emptyDom(selector){
 const elem = document.querySelector(selector);
 if(elem) elem.innerHTML = "";
}

Now you can call the function and pass the selector like below:

If element has id = foo

emptyDom('#foo');

If element has class = foo

emptyDom('.foo');

if element has tag = <div>

emptyDom('div')

var empty_element = function (element) {

    var node = element;

    while (element.hasChildNodes()) {              // selected elem has children

        if (node.hasChildNodes()) {                // current node has children
            node = node.lastChild;                 // set current node to child
        }
        else {                                     // last child found
            console.log(node.nodeName);
            node = node.parentNode;                // set node to parent
            node.removeChild(node.lastChild);      // remove last node
        }
    }
}

This will remove all nodes within the element.

If you use jQuery:

$('#foo').empty();

If you don't:

var foo = document.getElementById('foo');
while (foo.firstChild) foo.removeChild(foo.firstChild);