Which selector do I need to select an option by its text?

Question

This could help:

$('#test').find('option[text="B"]').val();

Demo fiddle

This would give you the option with text B and not the ones which has text that contains B. Hope this helps

For recent versions of jQuery the above does not work. As commented by Quandary below, this is what works for jQuery 1.9.1:

$('#test option').filter(function () { return $(this).html() == "B"; }).val();

Updated fiddle

You can use the :contains() selector to select elements that contain specific text.
For example:

$('#mySelect option:contains(abc)')

To check whether a given <select> element has such an option, use the .has() method:

if (mySelect.has('option:contains(abc)').length)

To find all <select>s that contain such an option, use the :has() selector:

$('select:has(option:contains(abc))')

None of the previous suggestions worked for me in jQuery 1.7.2 because I'm trying to set the selected index of the list based on the value from a textbox, and some text values are contained in multiple options. I ended up using the following:

$('#mySelect option:contains(' + value + ')').each(function(){
    if ($(this).text() == value) {
        $(this).attr('selected', 'selected');
        return false;
    }
    return true;
});

I faced the same issue below is the working code :

$("#test option").filter(function() {
    return $(this).text() =='Ford';
}).prop("selected", true);

Demo : http://jsfiddle.net/YRBrp/83/