foradream
foradream

Reputation: 81

Delete duplicate entries from a select box

How would I, using jQuery, remove the dups

        <option value="English">English</option>
        <option value="English">English</option>
        <option value="English">English</option>
        <option value="Geology">Geology</option>
        <option value="Geology">Geology</option>
        <option value="Information Technology">Information Technology</option>
        <option value="Music">Music</option>
        <option value="Music">Music</option>
        <option value="Zoology">Zoology</option>

Upvotes: 6

Views: 14595

Answers (4)

Chandra Kumar
Chandra Kumar

Reputation: 4205

Try use below code to remove duplicate options:

$("#color option").val(function(idx, val) {
  $(this).siblings("[value='"+ val +"']").remove();
});
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<select class ="select-form" name="color" id="color">
  <option value="">Select Color</option>
  <option value="1">Color 1</option>
  <option value="2">Color 2</option>
  <option value="3">Color 3</option>
  <option value="3">Color 3</option> <!-- will be removed since value is duplicate -->
  <option value="2">Color 2</option> <!-- will be removed since value is duplicate -->
</select>

Upvotes: -1

Adam Kiss
Adam Kiss

Reputation: 11859

From top of my head, untested:

$('#mySelect option').each(function(){
  if ($('#mySelect option[value="'+$(this).val()+'"]').length) $(this).remove();
});

Upvotes: 1

Nick Craver
Nick Craver

Reputation: 630409

You can do it like this:

var found = [];
$("select option").each(function() {
  if($.inArray(this.value, found) != -1) $(this).remove();
  found.push(this.value);
});

Give it a try here, it's a simple approach, we're just keeping an array of found values, if we haven't found the value, add it to the array (.push()), if we have found the value, this one's a dupe we found earlier, .remove() it.

This only crawls the <select> once, minimizing DOM traversal which is a lot more expensive than array operations. Also we're using $.inArray() instead of .indexOf() so this works properly in IE.


If you want a less efficient but shorter solution (just for illustration, use the first method!):

$('select option').each(function() {
  $(this).prevAll('option[value="' + this.value + '"]').remove();
});

You can test it here, this removes all siblings with the same value, but it's much more expensive than the first method (DOM Traversal is expensive, and multiple selector engine calls here, many more). We're using .prevAll() because you can't just remove .siblings() inside an .each(), it'll cause some errors with the loop since it expected the next child. ​

Upvotes: 13

jantimon
jantimon

Reputation: 38140

The easiest way that came into my mind was using siblings

$("select>option").each( function(){

 var $option = $(this);  

 $option.siblings()
       .filter( function(){ return $(this).val() == $option.val() } )
       .remove()


})

Upvotes: 3

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