How can I count the number of children?

Question

I have a list

  

  

  

  ...

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

Answer 1

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;