Question

I would like to be able to determine if a parent node, whose ID I know, has direct child nodes, and if such nodes are detected, remove them. The nodes, if they exist, will always follow some text, so I don’t think I can use firstChild or lastChild.

Ideally, I would use Javascript to minimize the performance hit. Although JQuery would also work if necessary.

The code is like this:

<a id="anchorID">some text 
<span class="spanClass">some span text</span>
</a>

Any help, as always, is appreciated.

Answer 1

If you’d like to remove the child nodes in your anchor, and you’re ok with jQuery, then it’s quite simply:

$("#anchorId").empty();

EDIT

You want to remove the span only?

$("#anchorID span").remove();

That will remove all spans in the anchor. If you wanted to remove only the first span, then you could do

$("#anchorID span:first").remove();