6 jQuery snippets you can use to manipulate select inputs

When it comes to manipulating the DOM, fewer elements are more tiresome than the good old select input. Fortunately for us, jQuery makes what was once a headache, a walk in the park.

Listed below are 6 snippets which should make manipulating those selects more pleasant than say, pulling your own teeth.

1. Getting the value of a selected option.

$('#selectList').val();

This couldn’t be simpler. Remember how before jQuery, you had to use selectedIndex and all those lovely javascript methods. I do, and I don’t miss it one bit.

2. Getting the text of a selected option.

$('#selectList :selected').text();

Similar in concept to the first snippet with one difference. Where the first example gives you the “value” of the selected option, this example gives you the actual text contained inside the option tag.

3. Getting the text/value of multiple selected options.

var foo = [];
$('#multiple :selected').each(function(i, selected){
foo[i] = $(selected).text();
});
// to get the selected values, just use .val() - this returns a string or array
foo = $('#multiple :selected').val();

Once again, the same concept as the first two examples, except we’re now using jQuery’s “each()” method to loop through all selected options in a multiple select list. Each value or text value is read into an array for later use.

4. Using selected options in conditional statements

switch ($('#selectList :selected').text()) {
case 'First Option':
//do something
break;
case 'Something Else':
// do something else

break;
}

Much like example 2, we’re getting the text() value of a selected option, only this time we’re going to use it inside a switch statement.

5. Removing an option.

$("#selectList option[value='2']").remove();

Using an attribute filter, we can find and therefore manipulate specific options within a select list. In this example we’re telling jQuery to find the option with value=”2″ and then remove it from the select list. We can similarly add options to a select list as we’ll see in example 6.

6. Moving options from list A to list B.

$().ready(function() {
$('#add').click(function() {
return !$('#select1 option:selected').appendTo('#select2');
});
$('#remove').click(function() {
return !$('#select2 option:selected').appendTo('#select1');
});
});

Originally posted by Jeremy Martin, here we have 2 select lists and 2 buttons. If you click the “add” button, we remove the selected option from select1 and add that same option to select2. The “remove” button just does things the opposite way around. Thanks to jQuery’s chaining capabilities, what was once a rather tricky undertaking with JS can now be done in 6 lines of code.

And there you go. That wasn’t so bad now was it ? If you have any other handy snippets, or you’ve found an easier way to do something already covered here, why not leave a comment and share the love!

Update:

Incidentally, a few hours after first publishing this post I came across the following “select element cheat sheet”. Technically speaking, it may be a little big to be called a cheat sheet, but the author has given a very thorough and practical guide which I’m definitely going to be making use of.