Question

I have seen the jquery documents, stackoverflow and other forums, but this doesn’t seem to work.

I have a radio button in a form, and I want to get the value of the selection.

If I remove the radio button from the form, I can get it by simply

var first_val = $('input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val();

But if I add it to to a form name=lifestyle

Any of these combinations don’t work

I have a form named lifestyle
I have tried all the options in Chrome and it doesn’t seem to work

Option 1

var first_val = $('#lifestyle input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val();
alert($('#lifestyle input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val());

Option 2

var first_val = $('form input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val(); 
alert($('form input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val());

Option 3

var first_val = $('#lifestyle input:radio[name=Question0]:checked', '#lifestyle').val();
alert($('#lifestyle input:radio[name=Question0]:checked','#lifestyle').val());

And so on..

I don’t get the value and the alert says undefined.

Answer 1

“If I remove the radio button from the form, I can get it by simply”

var first_val = $('input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val();

That selector should work regardless of whether the input belongs to a form or not. You’d only need to specify the form if there are multiple forms which each have inputs with the same name.

I would expect this to work:

$('form[name="lifestyle"] input:radio[name=Question0]:checked').val()

Option 1 doesn’t work because your form has the name “lifestyle” but you are trying to use the id selector format with a “#”. So:

//use
"form[name=lifestyle]"
// not
"#lifestyle"

Option 2 looks fine to me, assuming you have only one form element on the page.

Option 3 has the same problem with “#” selecting by id rather than name, but also by using the $("selector", context) syntax you are supposed to supply “A DOM Element, Document, or jQuery to use as context” (as explained here, not a string, but in any case providing an element as context and then looking for that element within itself doesn’t make sense.