JS/Jquery: how to check whether dropdown has selected values?

Question

I've googled and tried a number of ways to do this but none work for me so far. What I am looking for is quite simple: I want to be able to tell whether a dropdown has a selected value or not. The problem is that selectedIndex, :selected, val(), etc. do return results for the following case:

<select>
<option value="123">123</option>
<option value="234">234</option>
</select>

Obviously the browser will display this dropdown with the 123 option being selected but it will be selected only because there are no other options, in reality this dropdown doesn't have a selected value because there is no "selected" property. So basically I am trying to find how to tell apart the above dropdown from this one

<select>
<option selected value="123">123</option>
<option value="234">234</option>
</select>

Answer 1

var hasValue = ($('select > [selected]').length > 0);

Alternatively,

var hasValue = $('select').has('[selected]');