[jquery] How can I count the number of children?

I have a list

<ul>
  <li>
  <li>
  <li>
  ...
</ul>

I need jQuery to count the number of items in my list.

You don't need jQuery for this. You can use JavaScript's .childNodes.length.

Just make sure to subtract 1 if you don't want to include the default text node (which is empty by default). Thus, you'd use the following:

var count = elem.childNodes.length - 1;

You can do this using jQuery:

This method gets a list of its children then counts the length of that list, as simple as that.

$("ul").find("*").length;

The find() method traverses DOM downwards along descendants, all the way down to the last descendant.

Note: children() method traverses a single level down the DOM tree.

What if you are using this to determine the current selector to find its children so this holds: <ol> then there is <li>s under how to write a selector var count = $(this+"> li").length; wont work..

Try to get using:

var count = $("ul > li").size();
alert(count);