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How to remove all children from a DOM element

Updated Dec 03 2019

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Given an item in the DOM, use querySelector() to identify it, like this:

const item = document.querySelector('#itemId')

then, to remove all its children elements, you have a few different solutions.

The fastest way looks like this:

item.innerHTML = ''

Another solution that is suggested is this: create a loop, check if the firstChild property is defined (the element has at least a child) and then remove it:

const item = document.querySelector('#itemId')
while (item.firstChild) {
  item.removeChild(item.firstChild)
}

The loop ends when all children are removed.

The first, in most performance benchmarks I checked, looks like being the fastest solution.

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