The removeChild() method of the Node interface removes a child node from the DOM and returns the removed node.
Note: As long as a reference is kept on the removed child, it still exists in memory, but is no longer part of the DOM. It can still be reused later in the code.
If the return value of removeChild() is not stored, and no other reference is kept, it will be automatically deleted from memory after a short time.
Unlike Node.cloneNode() the return value preserves the EventListener objects associated with it.
Given this HTML:
<div id="top">
<div id="nested"></div>
</div>
To remove a specified element when knowing its parent node:
let d = document.getElementById("top");
let d_nested = document.getElementById("nested");
let throwawayNode = d.removeChild(d_nested);
To remove a specified element without having to specify its parent node:
let node = document.getElementById("nested");
if (node.parentNode) {
node.parentNode.removeChild(node);
}
To remove all children from an element:
let element = document.getElementById("top");
while (element.firstChild) {
element.removeChild(element.firstChild);
}
let top = document.getElementById("top");
let nested = document.getElementById("nested");
let garbage = top.removeChild(nested);
<div id="top">
<div id="nested"></div>
</div>
let top = document.getElementById("top");
let nested = document.getElementById("nested");
let garbage = top.removeChild(nested);
garbage = top.removeChild(nested);
