Question

I know how to get the attributes of an element, using jquery. But I’m not sure how to do it with the actual options in a select field.

<select referenceID="55" name="test" id="test">
  <option value="1">first option</option>
  <option value="2">second option</option>
  <option value="3">third option</option>
</select>

To get the referenceID I would just do this:

$("#test").attr("referenceID");

And when I want to get the value:

$("#test").val();

But I want to get a little more interesting. I want to put some specific info into each option:

<select name="test" id="test">
  <option value="1" title="something here"*>first option</option>
  <option value="2" title="something else here">second option</option>
  <option value="3" title="another thing here">third option</option>
</select>

Is it possible to grab an attribute within the options tags?

I intend to have an onselect function that reads the title tag, and does helps me with some other things.

Answer 1

Presuming you want to find the title attribute of the selected option…

$('#test option:selected').attr('title');

That is, find the descendant element of #test that is (a) an option element and (b) is selected.

If you already have a selection containing #test, you can do this with find:

$('#test').find('option:selected').attr('title');