How to select <li> inside <ul>

Question

Assume I have html structure as

ul
  li //this one
    ul
      li
      li
      li
  li //this one

I don't want to get all li's. As I commented I just want to get first segment li's. How can I select them?

document.querySelectorAll("ul > li");

returns all li's.

edit: actually this is just a snippet of the tree.
I can't modify the structure as adding class or id. I'm looking for an answer to get the list of first layer lis

Answer 1

You need to select all the li items where the grandparent is not another list item.

:not(li) > * > li {}

This will only work if you don't have extra elements in the markup.

For example it would fail with:

<ul>
  <li>
    <div>
      <ul>
        <li>

A slower, but more reliable, approach would be to get all the list items and then filter out ones which had list item ancestors.

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName('li');
var lis_without_li_ancestors = [];
for (var i = 0; i < lis.length; i++) {
  var element = lis[i];
  if (!has_li_ancestor(element)) {
    lis_without_li_ancestors.push(element);
  }
}

console.log(lis_without_li_ancestors);

function has_li_ancestor(element) {
  var parent = element.parentNode;
  if (parent.tagName.toLowerCase() === "body") {
    return false;
  } else if (parent.tagName.toLowerCase() === "li") {
    return true;
  } else {
    return has_li_ancestor(parent);
  }
}

<ul>
  <li>
    <ul>
      <li>...
    </ul>
</ul>

Answer 2

In jQuery you can use this selector ul > li:not('ul > li > ul > li'):

$("ul > li:not('ul > li > ul > li')").css("background", "green");

ul > li {
  background: white;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<ul>
  <li>
    First
    <ul>
      <li>
        Second
        <ul>
          <li>Third</li>
        </ul>
      </li>
      <li>Second</li>
      <li>Second</li>
      <li>Second</li>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li>First</li>
  <li>First</li>
  <li>First</li>
</ul>