Question

Very simple question I hope.

I have the usual <select> box like this

<select id="select">
    <option value="1">this</option>
    <option value="2">that</option>
    <option value="3">other</option>
</select>

I can get the selected value (by using $("#select").val()) and the selected item’s display value (by using $("#select :selected").text().

But how can I store like an additional value in the <option> tag? I would like to be able to do something like <option value="3.1" value2="3.2">other</option> and get the value of the value2 attribute (which would be 3.2 in the example).

Answer 1

HTML Markup

<select id="select">
  <option value="1" data-foo="dogs">this</option>
  <option value="2" data-foo="cats">that</option>
  <option value="3" data-foo="gerbils">other</option>
</select>

Code

// JavaScript using jQuery
$(function(){
    $('select').change(function(){
       var selected = $(this).find('option:selected');
       var extra = selected.data('foo'); 
       ...
    });
});

// Plain old JavaScript
var sel = document.getElementById('select');
var selected = sel.options[sel.selectedIndex];
var extra = selected.getAttribute('data-foo');

See this as a working sample using jQuery here: http://jsfiddle.net/GsdCj/1/
See this as a working sample using plain JavaScript here: http://jsfiddle.net/GsdCj/2/

By using data attributes from HTML5 you can add extra data to elements in a syntactically-valid manner that is also easily accessible from jQuery.