Question

I borrowed the code from http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/#combobox but don’t know how to get the value of the selected item.

Hoping for a simple straight answer rather than reading their docs for the next 2 hours.

Answer 1

$('#combobox').val() might do the trick

ok, that’s not correct. do it this way:

$( "#combobox" ).autocomplete({
   select: function(event, ui) { ... }
});

in there do a console.log($(ui).val()) or something like it

then you should be able to do either:
$(‘#combobox’).text() or .val() to get its content.