How do I select an item by its text value in a dropdown using jQuery?

Question

If I had the following select, and did not know the value to use to select an item in advance like in this question or the index of the item I wanted selected, how could I s

Answer 1

This should do the trick:

// option text to search for
var optText = "Option B";
// find option value that corresponds
var optVal = $("#list option:contains('"+optText+"')").attr('value');
// select the option value 
$("#list").val( optVal )

As eyelidlessness points out, this will behave unpredictably when the text being searched for can be found in more than one option.