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JavaScript JavaScript and the DOM (Retiring) Getting a Handle on the DOM Practice Selecting Elements

Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points
Posted by Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points

How do I select list items when the page has multiple lists?

Trying to use a selector to select the items in a list, but there are multiple lists on the page. The list items I'm trying to select are within the <nav> tags.

Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points
Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points

Difficult to give someone credit for a best answer, I needed both of your advice to make this work. Thanks!

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,248 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,248 Points

This might be a good place for a descendant selector.

That's where you separate the terms with a space, and the items on the right are selected only if they are inside the item on the left. For example, the links (a) inside a "nav" would be selected by: "nav a".

Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points
Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points

Thanks, Steven! That sounds sensible, but I'm still not able to make this work. So here's a snippet of the HTML including the nav element:

 <body>
    <header>
      <a href="index.html" id="logo">
        <h1>Nick Pettit</h1>
        <h2>Designer</h2>
      </a>
      <nav>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="index.html" class="selected">Portfolio</a></li>
          <li><a href="about.html">About</a></li>
          <li><a href="contact.html">Contact</a></li>
        </ul>
      </nav>
    </header>
    <div id="wrapper">

And here is my attempt to select them in javascript:

let navigationLinks = document.getElementsByTagName('nav a');

I also tried:

let navigationLinks = document.getElementsByTagName('nav ul li');

let navigationLinks = document.getElementsByTagName('nav ul li a');

let navigationLinks = document.getElementsByTagName('nav li');

None of these return the three links.

Reuben Varzea
Reuben Varzea
23,182 Points
Reuben Varzea
Reuben Varzea
23,182 Points

Russell Fincher - I don't think getElementsByTagName() works with multiple tags. Try using querySelectorAll() instead.

Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points
Russell Fincher
Russell Fincher
257 Points

Thanks Reuben Varzea! I was unaware of that. This worked:

let navigationLinks = document.querySelectorAll('nav ul li a');

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,248 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,248 Points

It does, but just "nav a" is enough to uniquely identify the target elements.