Select all “li” that do NOT contain a “ul” within

Question

I'm building a nested drop down navigation for products and I want to automatically hide any categories that are empty.

Unfortunately server side language does not allow efficient way of doing this, so I thought I could output number of products each category has directly, then use jQuery to remove any empty nodes.

I want to target only the li 's within nav#top_nav :

 <nav id="top_nav">
   <nav class="nav1">
     <ul>
       <li data-num-products="0">
         <a href="...">AAA</a>
         <ul>
            <li data-num-products="3"><a href="...">BBB</a></li>
            <li data-num-products="0"><a href="...">CCC</a></li>
         </ul>
       </li>
       <li data-num-products="7"><a href="">DDD</a></li>

     </ul>
   <nav>
 </nav>

Given 1 level of nesting ul 's, I want to remove any li 's that...

• have no nested ul 's within them and

• have data-num-products == 0 .

So in the example above AAA is retained because it has ul children, but CCC is removed because it has no ul children and no products.

UPDATE:

It might require 2 passes of removal because if a li contains a ul whose li elements are all removed, then we'll want to remove the ul too.

Answer 1

$( "#top_nav li").filter( function(){
    return !this.getElementsByTagName("ul").length && !+this.getAttribute("data-num-products");
}).remove();

http://jsfiddle.net/X2D7y/

This will only remove if there are no UL descendants AND have attribute value of 0

Answer 2

Like this:

$('#top_nav li[data-num-products="0"]:not(:has(ul))').remove();

The selector breakdown is...

'#top_nav'                // start at element with "top_nav" id
' '                       // and select descendant...
'li'                      // li elements...
'[data-num-products="0"]' //   ...where attribute "data-num-products" is "0"
':not('                   //   ...but exclude li elements that...
  ':has(ul)'              //        ...have descendant ul elements
')'

---

Regarding your updated question, just change :not(:has(ul)) to :not(:has(li)) .

$('#top_nav li[data-num-products="0"]:not(:has(li))').remove();

http://jsfiddle.net/4YFDd/

Answer 3

$("#top_nav li[data-num-products='0']").filter(function() { 
    return $(this).children("ul").length === 0; 
}).remove();

Answer 4

In Javascript:

var lis = document.querySelectorAll( '#top_nav li[data-num-products="0"]' );
for( var li = 0; li < lis.length; li++ ) { 
    !lis[li].getElementsByTagName( 'ul' ).length && lis[li].parentNode.removeChild( lis[li] );
};

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ThinkingStiff/2zS9B/