Remove all child elements of a DOM node in JavaScript

Question

How would I go about removing all of the child elements of a DOM node in JavaScript?

Say I have the following (ugly) HTML:

    &         


        

Answer 1

The fastest...

var removeChilds = function (node) {
    var last;
    while (last = node.lastChild) node.removeChild(last);
};

Thanks to Andrey Lushnikov for his link to jsperf.com (cool site!).

EDIT: to be clear, there is no performance difference in Chrome between firstChild and lastChild. The top answer shows a good solution for performance.