document.getElementById('').length = 0 doesn't work under Win7

Question

I have a select list:

<select id="sel">
     <option>text1</option>
     <option>text2</option>
     <option>text3</option>
     <option>text4</option>
</select>

I want to delete all items, without for loop. I tried:

document.getElementById('sel').length = 0;

But this doesn't work in some browsers.
Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

document.getElementById( 'sel' ).innerHTML = '';

Moved from comment:

You should understand such a length property more like a read-only property that gives you information about the state of the object. Like when you get the length of an array. Changing that value however doesn't affect the actual object, while removing an element correctly will cause the browser to re-render the DOM for that element (and as such update the value). I guess some browsers might interpret setting a length to zero will clear that object but in general that shouldn't be the expected behaviour. Also I think Element.length actually isn't part of the DOM specification.

To add some references to that, the core DOM Element doesn't have any length parameter. Both the HTMLSelectElement and the HTMLOptionsCollection (which can be accessed via HTMLSelectElement.options) have a length attribute but setting it should raise a DOMException.

So in both ways setting the length is illegal by the standard and as such should not be used if you want to support most browsers.

Answer 2

Either of these work:

document.getElementById('sel').options.length = 0;

or

document.getElementById('sel').innerHTML = "";