Get an array of list element contents in jQuery

var optionTexts = [];
$("ul li").each(function() { optionTexts.push($(this).text()) });

...should do the trick. To get the final output you're looking for, join() plus some concatenation will do nicely:

var quotedCSV = '"' + optionTexts.join('", "') + '"';

kimstik was close, but not quite.

Here's how to do it in a convenient one-liner:

$.map( $('li'), function (element) { return $(element).text() });

Here's the full documentation for jQuery's map function, it's quite handy: http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.map/

Just to answer fully, here's the complete functionality you were looking for:

$.map( $('li'), function (element) { return $(element).text() }).join(', ');

Without redundant intermediate arrays:

var arr = $('li').map(function(i,el) {
    return $(el).text();
}).get();

See jsfiddle demo

And in clean javascript:

var texts = [], lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
for(var i=0, im=lis.length; im>i; i++)
  texts.push(lis[i].firstChild.nodeValue);

alert(texts);