Grabbing the text unescapes any escaped html. Grab the html.

[darfire]

Try having the text of an option element as something like <script>alert(11)</script> (<script>alert(11)</script> escaped). When you take $optionText with text() you get the unescaped content. When you set it later on the span.sod_option using html() you're basically undoing the escaping. This fixes it by keeping the escaped content.