Trying to capture the value of Select options List

[vegasvato]

I am one of those old school dinosaur types that has been around since the great depression and to be perfectly honest with you I am very comfortable with JavaScript and do not revert to plug-ins such as jQuery when I can get the same job done with pure clean JavaScript, but when I am trying to capture values from select options lists I used to use
var varName= document.formNa me.selectName.o ptions[selectName.sele ctedIndex].value
I LIKE THIS OLD FASHION WAY BECAUSE IT IS CLEAN AND EASY TO UNDERSTAND and even though I do use jQuery when I have no better choices the truth I find is that the additional lines of code that jQuery saves me isn't enough to be significant, and I am not a lazy coder...
But I am finding that doesn't work any more and now I am finding it more and more difficult to do the kind of coding I am used to, so any help would be very much appreciated???
I have to be leaving something out, I am sure the problem is with syntax but I haven't found it yet, and the same code seems to work on older web pages just fine.
By the way I am using windows 10/64

[RockybBalboa]

Simply use

alert($("#selectListId").val())

. It will show the selected value in the alert box.

[gits]

well - the OP didn't want to use jQuery for such a simple operation - but even noone answered the OPs question until now. So a simple example to achieve it with vanilla javascript can be found here:

https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/tryit.asp?filename=tryjsref_select_value2

so if the only thing that would have to be done would be to retrieve the value of a select-element then including jQuery for this line that basically does the 'magic':

var x = document.getElementById("mySelect").value;

would create the overhead of loading that lib for that only. Besides that - the (jQuery-) $-function obviously wraps exactly the plain DOM-methods - but this way it can only be slower - since basically you call a facade that dispatches to the correct DOM-method in the end. This is of course a theoretical issue - but when it comes to a point where you would use such facade-methods in a loop it can be significantly slower.