Question

My drop down has the following values:

US USA
IN India

And other countries.

In my jQuery I want to set the selected item in dropdown to “IN India” by just passing “India”. I would like to know if there is a way to achieve that.

Answer 1

Something like?

HTML

​<select id="select1">
<option val="US USA">USA</option>
<option val="IN India">India</option>
</select>​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

JS

$(document).ready(function(){
$('#select1').find('option').each(function(){
    if($(this).val().indexOf('India')!=-1) {
        $(this).attr('selected','selected');
    }
});
});

Working demo http://jsfiddle.net/FKdpn/

Obviously this is tied to the document.ready function, but you can change it as per your requirements. Let me know if you need more help.