Finding child element of parent pure javascript

Question

What would the most efficient method be to find a child element of (with class or ID) of a particular parent element using pure javascript only. No jQuery or other framework

Answer 1

The children property returns an array of elements, like so:

parent = document.querySelector('.parent');
children = parent.children; // [
]

There are alternatives to querySelector, like document.getElementsByClassName('parent')[0] if you so desire.

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Edit: Now that I think about it, you could just use querySelectorAll to get decendents of parent having a class name of child1:

children = document.querySelectorAll('.parent .child1');

The difference between qS and qSA is that the latter returns all elements matching the selector, while the former only returns the first such element.