Why does `childNodes` return a number larger than I expect?

Question

Could you please look at this jsFiddle example, and tell me why the number \'11\' is alerted rather than \'5\' (the number of

elements)?

From

Answer 1

I cobbled together a solution for this that I like. (I got the idea from this blog post.)

1) First I get the number of child elements nodes by using:

nodeObject.childElementCount;

2) Then I wrote a function that will return any child element node by index number. I did this by using firstElementChild and nextElementSibling in a for loop.

function getElement(x, parentNode){
    var item = parentNode.firstElementChild
    for (i=0;i

This returns the child element I need for anything I want to pull from it. It skips the problem with childNodes retuning all the different nodes that are not helpful when trying to parse just the elements. I am sure someone more experienced than me could clean this up. But I found this so helpful that I had to post it.