title: Get pre-selected value of an HTML select element
body: <p>Or through example, how can one retrieve "c" via JavaScript or jQuery no matter if the user changed it?</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;select id="select-menu"&gt;
      &lt;option value="a"&gt;A&lt;/option&gt;
      &lt;option value="b"&gt;B&lt;/option&gt;
      &lt;option value="c" selected&gt;C&lt;/option&gt;
      &lt;option value="d"&gt;D&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;/select&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried the following, however, it returns the value of the currently selected menu. I suppose I can take a similar approach which runs upon page load and save the value, but expect there is a more "proper" way to do so.</p>
  
  <pre><code>$('#select-menu &gt; option').each(function(i){
      if(this.selected) {
          console.log(this.value)
           $("#submit").val(this.value);
           return false;
      }
  })
  </code></pre>