How to Reliably Retrieve Selected Options from a Dropdown Using jQuery?

Retrieving Selected Option from a Dropdown Using jQuery

When working with dropdown menus, it's important to retrieve the selected option accurately. While $("#id").val() is commonly used for this purpose, it may return unexpected results in specific scenarios.

Issue:

In certain cases, using $("#id").val() may not return the value of the selected option, especially when the dropdown has an id attribute assigned. Let's consider the following HTML code example:

<label for="name">Name</label>
<input type="text" name="name">

In this scenario, using $('#aioConceptName').val() would return an empty string.

Solution:

To retrieve the selected option from a dropdown accurately, we need to use a slightly different approach. Depending on our requirements, we can obtain either the selected text or value.

Retrieving Selected Text:

To get the text of the selected option, we can use the following code:

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

Retrieving Selected Value:

To get the value of the selected option, we use a slightly different code:

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

The reason why val() doesn't work in this scenario is that clicking an option does not change the value of the dropdown itself. Instead, it adds the :selected property to the selected option, which is a child element of the dropdown. Therefore, we need to use find(":selected") to select the specific option and retrieve its text or value accordingly.

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