title: Convert HTML table to dropdown (or otherwise getting a select tag with columns)
body: <p>What I have in my code right now:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;select&gt;
     &lt;option value="..."&gt;Dr. Steve 555-222-9393&lt;/option&gt;
     &lt;option value="..."&gt;Jim 333-999-1111&lt;/option&gt;
     &lt;option value="..."&gt;New Emergency Services 0118-999-881-99-9119-7253&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;/select&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It looks bad, and after a few dozen entries it's very, <em>very</em> hard to read.</p>
  
  <p>What I'd like is to emulate a dropdown by using a table and then displaying just one row of the table at a time (with the currently selected row's value stored in a hidden input).</p>
  
  <p>The question: before I start writing it myself, has someone already done this (in any library)?  I've been going through the jquery plugin registry and there are plenty of plugins for converting <code>&lt;ul&gt;</code> to behave like <code>&lt;select&gt;</code> and tons to create fancy multi-selects. (Some of these might even work, if you could disable the multi- part.  SE's own Tags input has pretty fancy formatting in its "dropdown".) But if there's one that can turn a <code>&lt;table&gt;</code> (or anything else) into a select-with-columns, it's lost in the noise.</p>
  
  <p>Note: I've found a number of <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26853794/how-to-convert-html-table-into-a-dropdown-list-while-keeping-alignment-of-text">related</a> <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8790915/html-dropdown-multi-columns">posts</a>  that suggest using monospace fonts and padding to line data up in a plain select tag, but I'd like to think it can be done better, especially after seeing jquery plugins like Chosen.</p>