Which selector do I need to select an option by its text?

I need to check if a <select> has an option whose text is equal to a specific value.

For example, if there's an <option value="123">abc</option>, I would be looking for "abc".

Is there a selector to do this?

Im looking for something similar to $('#select option[value="123"]'); but for the text.

This could help:

$('#test').find('option[text="B"]').val();

Demo fiddle

This would give you the option with text B and not the ones which has text that contains B.

For recent versions of jQuery the above does not work. As commented by Quandary below, this is what works for jQuery 1.9.1:

$('#test option').filter(function () { return $(this).html() == "B"; }).val();

Updated fiddle

You can use the :contains() selector to select elements that contain specific text.
For example:

$('#mySelect option:contains(abc)')

To check whether a given <select> element has such an option, use the .has() method:

if (mySelect.has('option:contains(abc)').length)

To find all <select>s that contain such an option, use the :has() selector:

$('select:has(option:contains(abc))')

None of the previous suggestions worked for me in jQuery 1.7.2 because I'm trying to set the selected index of the list based on the value from a textbox, and some text values are contained in multiple options. I ended up using the following:

$('#mySelect option:contains(' + value + ')').each(function(){
	if ($(this).text() == value) {
		$(this).attr('selected', 'selected');
		return false;
	}
	return true;
});

I faced the same issue below is the working code :

$("#test option").filter(function() {
    return $(this).text() =='Ford';
}).prop("selected", true);

Demo : http://jsfiddle.net/YRBrp/83/

This worked for me: $("#test").find("option:contains('abc')");

This is the best method for select text in dropdownlist.

$("#dropdownid option:contains(your selected text)").attr('selected', true);

I tried a few of these things until I got one to work in both Firefox and IE. This is what I came up with.

$("#my-Select").val($("#my-Select" + " option").filter(function() { return this.text == myText }).val());

another way of writing it in a more readable fasion:

var valofText = $("#my-Select" + " option").filter(function() {
	return this.text == myText
}).val();
$(ElementID).val(valofText);

Pseudocode:

$("#my-Select").val( getValOfText( myText ) );

Use following

$('#select option:contains(ABC)').val();

This work for me

$('#mySelect option:contains(' + value + ')').attr('selected', 'selected');

For jquery version 1.10.2 below worked for me

  var selectedText="YourMatchText";
    $('#YourDropdownId option').map(function () {
       if ($(this).text() == selectedText) return this;
      }).attr('selected', 'selected');
    });

This will work in jQuery 1.6 (note colon before the opening bracket), but fails on the newer releases (1.10 at the time).

$('#mySelect option:[text=abc]")

This works for me:

var result = $('#SubjectID option')
            .filter(function () 
             { return $(this).html() == "English"; }).val();

The result variable will return the index of the matched text value. Now I will just set it using it's index:

$('#SubjectID').val(result);

That was 10 years ago. Now jquery is EOL, we can use ordinary DOM for this simple job

document.getElementById("SomeSelectId").querySelectorAll("option").forEach(o => o.selected = o.innerText == text);

use prop instead of attr

$('#mySelect option:contains(' + value + ')').each(function(){
    if ($(this).text() == value) {
        $(this).prop('selected', 'selected');
        return false;
    }
    return true;
});

This will also work.

$('#test').find("select option:contains('B')").filter(":selected");

As described in this answer, you can easily create your own selector for hasText. This allows you to find the option with $('#test').find('option:hastText("B")').val();

Here's the hasText method I added:

 if( ! $.expr[':']['hasText'] ) {
     $.expr[':']['hasText'] = function( node, index, props ) {
       var retVal = false;
       // Verify single text child node with matching text
       if( node.nodeType == 1 && node.childNodes.length == 1 ) {
         var childNode = node.childNodes[0];
         retVal = childNode.nodeType == 3 && childNode.nodeValue === props[3];
       }
       return retVal;
     };
  }

This works for me

var options = $(dropdown).find('option');
var targetOption = $(options).filter(
function () { return $(this).html() == value; });

console.log($(targetOption).val());

Thanks for all the posts.

Either you iterate through the options, or put the same text inside another attribute of the option and select with that.