Get index of selected option with jQuery

Question

I'm a little bit confused about how to get an index of a selected option from a HTML <select> item.

On this page there are two methods described. However, both are always returning -1. Here is my jQuery code:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#dropDownMenuKategorie").change(function(){
        alert($("#dropDownMenuKategorie option:selected").index());
        alert($("select[name='dropDownMenuKategorie'] option:selected").index());
    });
});

and in html

(...)
<select id="dropDownMenuKategorie">
    <option value="gastronomie">Gastronomie</option>
    <option value="finanzen">Finanzen</option>
    <option value="lebensmittel">Lebensmittel</option>
    <option value="gewerbe">Gewerbe</option>
    <option value="shopping">Shopping</option>
    <option value="bildung">Bildung</option>
</select>
(...)

Why this behavior? Is there any chance that the select is not "ready" at the moment of assigning its change() method? Additionally, changing .index() to .val() is returning the right value, so that's what confuses me even more.

Answer 1

The first methods seem to work in the browsers that I tested, but the option tags doesn't really correspond to actual elements in all browsers, so the result may vary.

Just use the selectedIndex property of the DOM element:

alert($("#dropDownMenuKategorie")[0].selectedIndex);

Update:

Since version 1.6 jQuery has the prop method that can be used to read properties:

alert($("#dropDownMenuKategorie").prop('selectedIndex'));