How to get ALL children from a node?

Question

I'm trying to get every child of a node, but the method get_children() only returns the first node. How can I get every child of a node?

Answer 1

Hi,
Try this:

for _i in self.get_children():
    print(_i)

Comments

No, sadly that still only returns the first child. I've heard using get_next() works, but I can't ever get it to work.

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What's the output of this: print(get_child_count ())

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To me this returns all the children of the node in the stable version of godot:

for _i in self.get_children ():
     print (_i)

o is referred to grandchildren, etc?

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it prints 1. The children I'm trying to get are all instances of the same scene. Could this be why it's only returning 1?

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sounds like it. Add this print(get_parent()) to _ready() It will tell you the parent.
It depends what you want to do, but you could add all of the instances to a a group, such as: add_to_group("nmeships")
Which is what I do for all of my enemy ships. Then to get all of my enemy ships, I do:
var _nmeships = get_tree().get_nodes_in_group("nmeships")

And to loop through them: for _enenmy in _nmeships:

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Thats super smart, thanks! I haven't been using groups in this project, so it's nice to know when they can be used

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you're welcome, I can't remember where I picked that up from, could have been a Udemy course.

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From the Doc:
TreeItem getchildren ( )
Returns the TreeItem's first child item or a null object if there is none.
and
TreeItem getnext ( )
Returns the next TreeItem in the tree or a null object if there is none.

I thought of using
getchildren and getnext loop to fetch one by one.
But it seem get_children returns all the children of the node as an array.