Select all li's but not children

Question

I have this code:

$li = $("li", this)

Which is selecting all of the li's in my code. This works fine however I want $li to exclude the li's that are within a submenu.

    <ul id="navigation">
        <li><a href="#">blah 1</a></li>
        <ul id="subnav">
            <li><a href="#">sub 1</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">sub 2</a></li>
            <li><a href="#">sub 3</a></li>
        </ul>
        </li>
        <li><a href="#">blah 2</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">blah 3</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">blah 4</a></li>
        <li><a href="#">blah 5</a></li>
    </ul>

So $li would only reference the blah's not the sub's.

I thought it was something like:

$li = $("li", this).parents()

But this doesn't do what I want.

Answer 1

Just use the child selector >:

$("#navigation > li")

Answer 2

You want to use the immediate child selector, >:

$li = $('#navigation > li');

Answer 3

var li = $("#navigation > li");

The > selects only direct children