Question

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JavaScript retrieving the text of the selected option in select element

<select name="users" onchange="showUser(this.value)">
<option value="">Select a person:</option>
<option value="1"> Option1 </option>
<option value="2"> Option2 </option>
<option value="3"> Option3 </option>
<option value="4"> Option4 </option>
</select>

From the above example, the integer value is being passed to the showUser function by the use of this.value. If instead of passing the value, I wanted to pass the contents of whatever is inside the option tag, like “Option1”, how would I do this? I have tried using

showUser(this.innerHTML)

but that doesn’t seem to work, or perhaps I’m approaching it incorrectly. I’ve looked online at options to use getElementByID but then I think I would need a unique ID for every option.

Answer 1

You’d use:

showUser(this.selectedIndex >= 0 ? this.options[this.selectedIndex].text : '');

See the DOM2 HTML specification’s documentation of HTMLSelectElement and HTMLOptionsElement.