jQuery Get Selected Option From Dropdown

William Kinaan picture William Kinaan · May 18, 2012 · Viewed 1.5M times · Source

Usually I use $("#id").val() to return the value of the selected option, but this time it doesn't work. The selected tag has the id aioConceptName

html code

<label>Name</label>
<input type="text" name="name" />
<select id="aioConceptName">
    <option>choose io</option>
    <option>roma</option>
    <option>totti</option>
</select>

Answer

Elliot Bonneville picture Elliot Bonneville · May 18, 2012

For dropdown options you probably want something like this:

var conceptName = $('#aioConceptName').find(":selected").text();

The reason val() doesn't do the trick is because clicking an option doesn't change the value of the dropdown--it just adds the :selected property to the selected option which is a child of the dropdown.