How to get the optgroup for a multiselect in jQuery?

Question

I am using a multiselect with options grouped together.

<select title="Fruits" multiple="multiple" id="fruits" name="fruits[]">
    <option selected="selected" label="All" value="">All</option>
    <optgroup label="" class="fruit">
        <option label="apple" value="1">Apple</option>
        <option label="pear" value="2">Pear</option>
        <option label="orange" value="3">Orange</option>
    </optgroup>
    <optgroup label="" class="berries">
        <option label="strawberry" value="4">Strawberry</option>
        <option label="raspberry" value="5">Raspberry</option>
        <option label="blueberry" value="6">Blueberry</option>
    </optgroup>
</select>

I've tried $(this).find("option:selected").parent().attr("label") which only returns the optgroup of the first selected option, meaning if Strawberry and Pear were both selected, optgroup '.fruit' would be returned on both accounts.

Using jQuery, how do I get the optgroup of each selected option?

Answer 1

Try this

$(this).find("option:selected").each(function(){
    $(this).parent().attr("label");
});

Answer 2

This may be a little late, but I just finished working on this issue and this seems to be the most elegant solution I have found:

$("#fruits option").filter(":selected").parent("optgroup").attr("label");

Here is a fiddle modified for this particular example (Using the class attribute rather than the label attribute): http://jsfiddle.net/pNjsj/

Hope that helps someone :)