Checking to see what item is selected in an HTML select list via jQuery
<p>How do I get the actual value (or text) of the item selected in an HTML select box?  Here are the main methods I've tried...</p>

<pre><code>
document.getElementById('PlaceNames').value
</code></pre>

<pre><code>
$("#PlaceNames option:selected").val()
</code></pre>

<pre><code>
$("#PlaceNames option:selected").text()
</code></pre>

<p>And I've tried various variations on these.  All I ultimately want to do is get that data and send it to a web service via AJAX, I just need the string representation of what the user selected.  This seems like it should be really easy and I've even found a question similar to this here, but I'm still having issues getting it worked out.  Google doesn't seem to be helping either.  I feel like it must be due to some fundamental misunderstanding of Javascript and jQuery.  </p>

<p>EDIT:  I should mention that I'm using IE7</p>
