How to count elements inside an object?

Question

My ajax request is returning an object with my HTML inside it, I want to count the divs in this object, just can't figure out how.

Some code:

$.ajax({
 type: "GET",
 url: "/activity_results.html?"+options,
 cache: false,
 success: function(html, status){
 if(html != ""){
 $(html).appendTo("#comments");
 alert(($(html)).length);
}
}
});

In the alert I am showing the length of the whole HTML object but I want to really be drilling down into it and showing the length of a specific set of divs.

Answer 1

There are two ways to do it:

$("#comments div").length

Or with the context parameter:

$("div", "#comments").length

They'll both give you the number of divs inside comments, but the 2nd method is faster.

If I understand what you're trying to do then it looks like the above solution would work for you. But there is a 3rd possibility. If you've already selected an object and need to see how many elements of a certain type are inside it, then that's a little different. If for example you're working with "this", then it's not practical to use the above method.

Instead you might do something like this:

$(this).find("div").length

Or this to get the count of immediate divs only:

$(this).children("div").length