Select Option Value return Integer by default

Question

Is it has any way to get value from Select Option as Integer by default ?

from select here

<select id="lesson_per_class" >
 <option value="">&nbsp;</option>
 <option value="1">1 Lesson</option>
 <option value="2">2 Lessons</option>
 <option value="3">3 Lessons</option>
 <option value="4">4 Lessons</option>
</select>

When I tried to get their value to calculate, I found that it return as String and can't use to calculate here

var lesson_per_class = $('#lesson_per_class').val();
alert('value is ' + ( 10 + lesson_per_class )); 
// it give result as 10x instead of 1x 

currently, the way I solved is parseInt(), but I need to know, is it has anyway to get it as Integer by default?

Answer 1

From the spec you can see the value is a DOMString so no, you cannot get an integer by default.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/forms.html#the-option-element

For Java and ECMAScript, DOMString is bound to the String type because both languages also use UTF-16 as their encoding.

[NamedConstructor=Option(optional DOMString text = "", optional DOMString value, optional boolean defaultSelected = false, optional boolean selected = false)]
interface HTMLOptionElement : HTMLElement {
           attribute boolean disabled;
  readonly attribute HTMLFormElement? form;
           attribute DOMString label;
           attribute boolean defaultSelected;
           attribute boolean selected;
           attribute DOMString value;

           attribute DOMString text;
  readonly attribute long index;
};

Answer 2

No, there isn't - val() always returns a string. You have to use parseInt() as you already found out yourself.

There is an index() method, which might work in this case (because the first option has index 0):

$('#lesson_per_class option:selected').index()