Showing/hiding hint text

I've created a .js file with the following in it:

$('.emailhinttext').hide();
$('select').change(function() {
if ($(this).val() == 'For yourself, your church, school, a friend etc...') {
    $('.emailhinttext').show();
}
if ($(this).val() == 'A Charity like Oxfam, Marie Curie or Help the Aged') {
    $('.emailhinttext').hide();
}
});

It does have a couple of other things in it (Should that matter?) and I include the file in the header of my page along with jQuery.

my html is:

<div class="input select">
    <label for="I am raising money for">I am raising money for...</label>
    <select name="data[I am raising money for]" id="I am raising money for">
        <option value="0">A Charity like Oxfam, Marie Curie or Help the Aged</option>
        <option value="1">For yourself, your church, school, a friend etc...</option>
</select></div>
<div class="input text required">
    <label for="UserEmail">Email&nbsp;&nbsp;<div class="emailhinttext">*Please use the same email as your paypal account</div></label>
    <input name="data[User][email]" type="text" maxlength="255" id="UserEmail" />
</div>

It doesn't work even though on jsfiddle something really similar works fine. What am I doing wrong?

The val() is either 0 or 1 (the value of value attribute), and not the text inside the option tag. So changing to if ($(this).val() == 1) will resolve your problem

Check a few things, you reference jQuery before your script, also make sure your script is wrapped in the document.ready call like:

$(document).ready(function(){
    // your code goes here
});

Any of that help?

This happens quite a lot; your jQuery code isn't executed when the page is loaded. You need to wrap it in a $(document).ready() function, like so:

$(document).ready(function()
{
    $('.emailhinttext').hide();

    $('select').change(function() 
    {
        if ($(this).val() == 'For yourself, your church, school, a friend etc...') 
        {
            $('.emailhinttext').show();
        }
        if ($(this).val() == 'A Charity like Oxfam, Marie Curie or Help the Aged') 
        {
            $('.emailhinttext').hide();
        }
    });
});

This will execute the jQuery when the document has loaded, instead of having it just sit in the DOM not doing much.