Keeping track of the number of Children of a GameObject

Question

I wrote this bit of code to count the children of a GameObject in my scene. It works but doesn't feel like the most elegant solution (particularly the line where I reset the childCount to 0 each time). Could someone offer me some re-write suggestions on this to make it more streamlined?

public int childCount;

public void countChildren() 
{
    GameObject buildBoard = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag("Board");

    GameObject[] allChildren = buildBoard.transform.Cast<Transform>().Select(t=>t.gameObject).ToArray();

    childCount = 0;

    for(int i = 0; i < allChildren.Length; i++)
    {
        childCount++;
    }

    Debug.Log(childCount);
}

Answer 1

I think you don't have to cast to Transform because GameObject.transform already returns Transform type. And Transform already has Transform.childCount method. So you can count like this:

public int childCount;
public void countChildren() 
{
    GameObject buildBoard = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag("Board");

    childCount = buildBoard.transform.childCount;

    Debug.Log(childCount);
}

You can also wrap it into a little helper method:

public int CountChildrenForObjectWithTag(string tag)
{
    var gameObject = GameObject.FindGameObjectWithTag(tag);

    if (gameObject == null || gameObject.transform == null) return 0;

    return gameObject.transform.childCount;
}