jquery: how to get the value of id attribute?

Question

Basic jquery question. I have an option element as below.

Antarctica  

Answer 1

To match the title of this question, the value of the id attribute is:

var myId = $(this).attr('id');
alert( myId );

BUT, of course, the element must already have the id element defined, as:

Antarctica

In the OP post, this was not the case.

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IMPORTANT:

Note that plain js is faster (in this case):

var myId = this.id
alert(  myId  );

That is, if you are just storing the returned text into a variable as in the above example. No need for jQuery's wonderfulness here.