Fragments

A common pattern in React is for a component to return multiple elements. Fragments let you group a list of children without adding extra nodes to the DOM.

Example:

render() {
  return (
    <React.Fragment>
      <ChildA />
      <ChildB />
      <ChildC />
    </React.Fragment>
  );
}

Motivation

A common pattern is for a component to return a list of children. Take this example React snippet:

class Table extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <table>
        <tr>
          <Columns />
        </tr>
      </table>
    );
  }
}

<Columns /> would need to return multiple <td> elements in order for the rendered HTML to be valid. If a parent div was used inside the render() of <Columns />, then the resulting HTML will be invalid.

class Columns extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <td>Hello</td>
        <td>World</td>
      </div>
    );
  }
}

results in a <Table /> output of:

<table>
  <tr>
    <div>
      <td>Hello</td>
      <td>World</td>
    </div>
  </tr>
</table>

Fragments solve this problem. Fragments also cut down on the number of wrapping divs that have no other use than fulfilling the JSX syntax requirement.

Short Syntax

There is a new, shorter syntax you can use for declaring fragments. It looks like empty tags:

class Columns extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <>
        <td>Hello</td>
        <td>World</td>
      </>
    );
  }
}

You can use <></> the same way you’d use any other element except that it doesn’t support keys or attributes.

For more details see: React Docs