Get index of select option in an optgroup with jquery

Answer 1

Erm... whyever not good old DOM methods? For a single-select:

var idx= document.getElementById('end').selectedIndex;

// or $('#end')[0].selectedIndex if you must

Or, which will also work on multi-selects, get the option element node you're interested in and fetch option.index on it.

This is massively faster and simpler than getting jQuery to process complex selectors.