jQuery get specific option tag text

If you'd like to get the option with a value of 2, use

$("#list option[value='2']").text();

If you'd like to get whichever option is currently selected, use

$("#list option:selected").text();

It's looking for an element with id list which has a property value equal to 2.
What you want is the option child of the list:

$("#list option[value='2']").text()

This worked perfectly for me, I was looking for a way to send two different values with options generated by MySQL, and the following is generic and dynamic:

$(this).find("option:selected").text();

As mentioned in one of the comments. With this I was able to create a dynamic function that works with all my selection boxes that I want to get both values, the option value and the text.

Few days ago I noticed that when updating the jQuery from 1.6 to 1.9 of the site I used this code, this stop working... probably was a conflict with another piece of code... anyway, the solution was to remove option from the find() call:

$(this).find(":selected").text();

That was my solution... use it only if you have any problem after updating your jQuery.

Based on the original HTML posted by Paolo I came up with the following.

$("#list").change(function() {
    alert($(this).find("option:selected").text()+' clicked!');
});

It has been tested to work on Internet Explorer and Firefox.