Delete all rows in an HTML table

How can I delete all rows of an HTML table except the <th>'s using Javascript, and without looping through all the rows in the table? I have a very huge table and I don't want to freeze the UI while I'm looping through the rows to delete them

this will remove all the rows:

$("#table_of_items tr").remove(); 

Keep the <th> row in a <thead> and the other rows in a <tbody> then replace the <tbody> with a new, empty one.

i.e.

var new_tbody = document.createElement('tbody');
populate_with_new_rows(new_tbody);
old_tbody.parentNode.replaceChild(new_tbody, old_tbody)

Very crude, but this also works:

var Table = document.getElementById("mytable");
Table.innerHTML = "";

Points to note, on the Watch out for common mistakes:

If your start index is 0 (or some index from begin), then, the correct code is:

var tableHeaderRowCount = 1;
var table = document.getElementById('WRITE_YOUR_HTML_TABLE_NAME_HERE');
var rowCount = table.rows.length;
for (var i = tableHeaderRowCount; i < rowCount; i++) {
    table.deleteRow(tableHeaderRowCount);
}

NOTES

1. the argument for deleteRow is fixed
this is required since as we delete a row, the number of rows decrease.
i.e; by the time i reaches (rows.length - 1), or even before that row is already deleted, so you will have some error/exception (or a silent one).

2. the rowCount is taken before the for loop starts since as we delete the "table.rows.length" will keep on changing, so again you have some issue, that only odd or even rows only gets deleted.

Hope that helps.

This is an old question, however I recently had a similar issue.
I wrote this code to solve it:

var elmtTable = document.getElementById('TABLE_ID_HERE');
var tableRows = elmtTable.getElementsByTagName('tr');
var rowCount = tableRows.length;

for (var x=rowCount-1; x>0; x--) {
   elmtTable.removeChild(tableRows[x]);
}

That will remove all rows, except the first.

Cheers!

Assuming you have just one table so you can reference it with just the type. If you don't want to delete the headers:

$("tbody").children().remove()

otherwise:

$("table").children().remove()

hope it helps!

If you can declare an ID for tbody you can simply run this function:

var node = document.getElementById("tablebody");
while (node.hasChildNodes()) {
  node.removeChild(node.lastChild);
}

the give below code works great. It removes all rows except header row. So this code really t

$("#Your_Table tr>td").remove();

I needed to delete all rows except the first and solution posted by @strat but that resulted in uncaught exception (referencing Node in context where it does not exist). The following worked for me.

var myTable = document.getElementById("myTable");
var rowCount = myTable.rows.length;
for (var x=rowCount-1; x>0; x--) {
   myTable.deleteRow(x);
}

this would work iteration deletetion in HTML table in native

document.querySelectorAll("table tbody tr").forEach(function(e){e.remove()})

Assing some id to tbody tag. i.e. . After this, the following line should retain the table header/footer and remove all the rows.

document.getElementById("yourID").innerHTML="";

And, if you want the entire table (header/rows/footer) to wipe out, then set the id at table level i.e.

How about this:

When the page first loads, do this:

var myTable = document.getElementById("myTable");
myTable.oldHTML=myTable.innerHTML;

Then when you want to clear the table:

myTable.innerHTML=myTable.oldHTML;

The result will be your header row(s) if that's all you started with, the performance is dramatically faster than looping.

If you do not want to remove th and just want to remove the rows inside, this is working perfectly.

var tb = document.getElementById('tableId');
  while(tb.rows.length > 1) {
  tb.deleteRow(1);
}

If you have far fewer <th> rows than non-<th> rows, you could collect all the <th> rows into a string, remove the entire table, and then write <table>thstring</table> where the table used to be.

EDIT: Where, obviously, "thstring" is the html for all of the rows of <th>s.

This works in IE without even having to declare a var for the table and will delete all rows:

for(var i = 0; i < resultsTable.rows.length;)
{	
   resultsTable.deleteRow(i);
}

Assign an id or a class for your tbody.

document.querySelector("#tbodyId").remove();
document.querySelectorAll(".tbodyClass").remove();

You can name your id or class how you want, not necessarily #tbodyId or .tbodyClass.

this is a simple code I just wrote to solve this, without removing the header row (first one).

var Tbl = document.getElementById('tblId');
while(Tbl.childNodes.length>2){Tbl.removeChild(Tbl.lastChild);}

Hope it works for you!!.

@lkan's answer worked for me, however to leave the first row, change

from

for (var x=rowCount-1; x>0; x--)

to

for (var x=rowCount-1; x>1; x--)

Full code:

var myTable = document.getElementById("myTable");
var rowCount = myTable.rows.length;
for (var x=rowCount-1; x>1; x--) {
   myTable.deleteRow(x);
}

Pure javascript, no loops and preserving headers:

function restartTable(){

const tbody = document.getElementById("tblDetail").getElementsByTagName('tbody')[0];
    tbody.innerHTML = "";

}

<link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet"/>

 <table id="tblDetail" class="table table-bordered table-hover table-ligth table-sm table-striped">
            <thead>
                <tr>
                    <th>Header 1</th>
                    <th>Header 2</th>
                    <th>Header 2</th>
                    <th>Header 2</th>
                </tr>
            </thead>
            <tbody>
              <tr>
                <td>
                  a
                </td>
                <td>
                  b
                </td>
                <td>
                  c
                </td>
                <td>
                  d
                </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
                <td>
                  1
                </td>
                <td>
                  2
                </td>
                <td>
                  3
                </td>
                <td>
                  4
                </td>
                <tr>
                <td>
                  e
                </td>
                <td>
                  f
                </td>
                <td>
                  g
                </td>
                <td>
                  h
                </td>
               
              </tr>
              </tr>
            </tbody>
        </table>
        
                
        <button type="button" onclick="restartTable()">restart table</button>

Just Clear the table body.

$("#tblbody").html("");

Assuming the <table> element is accessible (e.g. by id), you can select the table body child node and then remove each child until no more remain. If you have structured your HTML table properly, namely with table headers in the <thead> element, this will only remove the table rows.

We use lastElementChild to preserve all non-element (namely #text nodes and ) children of the parent (but not their descendants). See this SO answer for a more general example, as well as an analysis of various methods to remove all of an element's children.

const tableEl = document.getElementById('my-table');

const tableBodyEl = tableEl.querySelector('tbody');

// or, directly get the <tbody> element if its id is known
// const tableBodyEl = document.getElementById('table-rows');

while (tableBodyEl.lastElementChild) {
  tableBodyEl.removeChild(tableBodyEl.lastElementChild);
}

<table id="my-table">
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Color</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody id="table-rows">
    <tr>
      <td>Apple</td>
      <td>Red</td>
    </tr>
    <!-- comment child preserved -->
    text child preserved
    <tr>
      <td>Banana</td>
      <td>Yellow</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>Plum</td>
      <td>Purple</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

const table = document.querySelector('table'); table.innerHTML === ' ' ? null : table.innerHTML = ' '; the above javascript worked fine for me. It checks to see if the table contains any data and then clears everything including the header.