# XML DOM childNodes Property

Element Object

## Definition and Usage

The childNodes property returns a NodeList containing the child nodes of the selected node

If the selected node has no children, this property returns a NodeList containing no nodes.

## Syntax

elementNode.childNodes

## Tips and Notes

Tip: To loop through a childNodes list, it is more efficient to use the nextSibling property than to explicitly use the childNodes list of the parent object.

## Example 1

The following code fragment loads "books.xml" into xmlDoc using loadXMLDoc() and gets the text node from the first <title> element in "books.xml":

## Example

xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");
x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("title")[0].childNodes[0];
document.write(x.nodeValue);

The output of the code above will be:

Everyday Italian
Try it yourself »

## Example 2

The following code fragment loads "books.xml" into xmlDoc using loadXMLDoc() and gets the number of child nodes from the first <book> element in "books.xml":

## Example

xmlDoc=loadXMLDoc("books.xml");
x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("book")[0].childNodes;
document.write(x.length);

In Internet Explorer the output of the code above will be:

4

In Mozilla browsers the output of the code above will be:

9
Try it yourself »

Firefox, and most other browsers, will treat empty white-spaces or new lines as text nodes, Internet Explorer will not. So, in the example above, the output will be different.

To read more about the differences between browsers, visit our DOM Browsers chapter in our XML DOM Tutorial.

Element Object

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