setting the selected option of a select tag with jquery

Question

If my jquery function is as below:

$('#shifts').change (function () 
    {

     $.get('ajax/time_menus.php', { shift: $('#shifts').val() },      
        function(data) 
     {
      $("#test").html( data );
      });

And returns a array with two time values contained in an array of six values: [hours][minutes][ampm][hours][minutes][ampm]

How would I set the values of 6 correlated menus as to display the two times I just loaded.

Is there a way to set the value via jquery or is it better to build the entire menu's in php and then pass them back and set the html.

Answer 1

With jQuery, you can select different <option>s with the val function:

$('#my-select').val(yourValue);

Answer 2

$('#my-select option[value="yourValue"]').attr('selected','selected');