removechild loop exits before finish

Question

I have the following piece of code that finds all elements in the document with classname foo and then removes them all

        function(doc) {
            v         


        

Answer 1

Your problem is that the NodeList returned by getElementsByClassName() is live. Either convert it into an array first as Felix suggests or iterate backwards:

var items = doc.getElementsByClassName('foo');
var i = items.length;
while (i--) {
    items[i].parentNode.removeChild(items[i]);
}

This works because the item removed from the list each iteration is the last item in the list, therefore not affecting earlier items.

I also changed doc.body to items[i].parentNode for greater generality, in case you need to deal with elements that are not direct children of the element.