jQuery: How to Locate the Selected Radio Button out of a Group of Radio Buttons

If you develop websites and work with JavaScript, but have never heard of jQuery before, then it is probably best that you start reading up on it right now. After all, as they like to put it themselves, jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript!

Radio buttons are pretty awesome when you need to ensure that a user has picked ONE of the given options presented to them, and using jQuery, it turns out to be a pretty simple affair to determine and manipulate exactly which radio button is currently selected from the group.

An example:

/* Your HTML...
<input type="radio" name="sample" value="1" />
<input type="radio" name="sample" value="2" checked="checked" />
<input type="radio" name="sample" value="3" />
*/

    // displays the selected radio button in an alert box
    alert($('input[name=sample]:checked').val());

The above will correctly select the selected radio button Sample 2 and will alert its value of… well 2.

The ‘input[name=sample]:checked’ jQuery selector is guaranteed to return us a result and of course, this result can be manipulated in which ever way you would like, as with any other jQuery selected DOM object.

Nifty.