Getting the “newest” selected option's text from multiple select list

Answer 1

You could do something like this, keeping the old value array and checking which new one isn't in there, like this:

var val;
$('#mySelect').change(function() {
 var newVal = $(this).val();
 for(var i=0; i<newVal.length; i++) {
     if($.inArray(newVal[i], val) == -1)
       alert($(this).find('option[value="' + newVal[i] + '"]').text());
 }
 val = newVal;
}); ​

Give it a try here, When you call .val() on a <select multiple> it returns an array of the values of its selected <option> elements. We're simply storing that, and when the selection changes, looping through the new values, if the new value was in the old value array ($.inArray(val, arr) == -1 if not found) then that's the new value. After that we're just using an attribute-equals selector to grab the element and get its .text().

If the value="" may contains quotes or other special characters that would interfere with the selector, use .filter() instead, like this:

$(this).children().filter(function() {
  return this.value == newVal[i];
}).text());