How to change options of <select> with jQuer

Question

Suppose a list of options is available, how do you update the <select> with new <option>s?

Answer 1

Does this help?

$("#SelectName option[value='theValueOfOption']")[0].selected = true;

Answer 2

$('#comboBx').append($("<option></option>").attr("value",key).text(value));

where comboBx is your combo box id.

or you can append options as string to the already existing innerHTML and then assign to the select innerHTML.

Edit

If you need to keep the first option and remove all other then you can use

var firstOption = $("#cmb1 option:first-child");
$("#cmb1").empty().append(firstOption);

Answer 3

Removing and adding DOM element is slower than modification of existing one.

If your option sets have same length, you may do something like this:

$('#my-select option')
.each(function(index) {
    $(this).text('someNewText').val('someNewValue');
});

In case your new option set has different length, you may delete/add empty options you really need, using some technique described above.

Answer 4

You can remove the existing options by using the empty method, and then add your new options:

var option = $('<option></option>').attr("value", "option value").text("Text");
$("#selectId").empty().append(option);

If you have your new options in an object you can:

var newOptions = {"Option 1": "value1",
  "Option 2": "value2",
  "Option 3": "value3"
};

var $el = $("#selectId");
$el.empty(); // remove old options
$.each(newOptions, function(key,value) {
  $el.append($("<option></option>")
     .attr("value", value).text(key));
});

Edit: For removing the all the options but the first, you can use the :gt selector, to get all the option elements with index greater than zero and remove them:

$('#selectId option:gt(0)').remove(); // remove all options, but not the first 

Answer 5

I threw CMS's excellent answer into a quick jQuery extension:

(function($, window) {
  $.fn.replaceOptions = function(options) {
    var self, $option;

    this.empty();
    self = this;

    $.each(options, function(index, option) {
      $option = $("<option></option>")
        .attr("value", option.value)
        .text(option.text);
      self.append($option);
    });
  };
})(jQuery, window);

It expects an array of objects which contain "text" and "value" keys. So usage is as follows:

var options = [
  {text: "one", value: 1},
  {text: "two", value: 2}
];

$("#foo").replaceOptions(options);

Answer 6

If for example your html code contain this code:

<select id="selectId"><option>Test1</option><option>Test2</option></select>

In order to change the list of option inside your select, you can use this code bellow. when your name select named selectId.

var option = $('<option></option>').attr("value", "option value").text("Text");
$("#selectId").html(option);

in this example above i change the old list of option by only one new option.