some questions on .val( ) and trying to break things down slower

im sorta confused on a few steps and i hope that someone can assist me in breaking down the code

so basically first we cycle through each menu anchor link with the .each() method. then for each anchor link we peform what is inside the function. in our case, first it creates a $anchor variable inside the function scope and gives it the value of $(this). so the example ill use here will be <a href="about.html">About</a>. and then we create another variable called $option within the function scope. but since the $anchor variable also contains html markup which we dont want, we use the .text() method to assign the $option variable [href="about.html"About]. basically now we removed the markup through the text method. however we only want the href attribute so we use the .attr () method to grab the href and assign it as the new $option variable. im not sure where .val() fits into all of this...and then we finally put this href into the select tag.

but when we use the attr method and tell it to grab href, what part of href is it grabbing. im pretty sure it grabs this entire thing: [href="about.html"About] for example. but how come in the dropdown it doesnt show the about.html part and only the about text?

1. Why can't we add [.attr("href")] after we write [var $anchor = $(this)]. we basically just want to cycle through each menu anchor element and we just want the href part. then we could just eliminate [$option.val($anchor.attr("href"))]. I tried it but it didn't work so im curious as to why we cant do that.

2. also i tried this and it sorta worked. why would letting [$option.text($anchor.text())] be [$option.text($anchor.attr("href"))] not work? we essentially take the href from the anchor variable in 1 go and add it to the option variable. then we dont have to use .val() im still hazy on .val()....but in the end the drop down menu only returns the index.html/about.html/etc. part of the href

3. i removed [$option.val($anchor.attr("href"))] from the code and it still works perfectly fine. What exactly does this line do. i know the href takes the href attribute from the $anchor variable but i still dont get what [.val()] does.

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