removing all text nodes from a particular div tag using javascript

i have some dynamically generated html from a php script. the php code looks like this

echo "<div id='categories'>\n";
foreach($category as $k => $v)
{
echo "<div class='category'>\n";
echo "<div id=\"$k\" class='cat_name'\n>$k</div>\n";
echo "<div id=\"$k".'_link"'." class='cat_link'>\n<a href=$v>Link</a>\n</div>\n";
echo "</div>\n";
}
echo "</div>\n";

i have a javascript file that tries to access the dom like this

var categories=document.getElementById('categories').childNodes;
for(i=0;i<categories.length;i++)
{
var link=categories[i].childNodes[1].childNodes[0].attributes['href'];
..
...
..

now this doesnt work as expected because there are text nodes in the html. when i used the firebug console to try this

document.getElementById('categories').childNodes[0].nodeType; // displays 3

it displays 3 which means that the node is a text node. i tried adding document.normalize(); in window.onload like this

window.onload=function() {
document.normalize();
var categories=document.getElementById('categories').childNodes;
...
...

but the text nodes remain in the html. how can i remove all the text nodes. now i dont think there is any method like getElementByType() so how do i get all text nodes.

Solution

Use .children instead of .childNodes to target elements only (no text nodes):

   // --------------------------------------------------v
var categories=document.getElementById('categories').children;

FF3 doesn't support that property, so if you're supporting that browser, you'll need a method to replicate it.

function children( parent ) {
    var node = parent.firstChild;
    var result = [];
    if( node ) {
        do {
            if( node.nodeType === 1 ) {
                result.push( node );
            }
        } while( node = node.nextSibling )
    }
    return result;
}
var parent = document.getElementById('categories');
var categories= parent.children || children( parent );

Also note that IE will give you comment nodes as well, so it would be better if your markup didn't include comments.