Q:

jQuery UI tabs. How to select a tab based on its id not based on index

I have two tabs and configured usign jQuery UI. 
ul  class="tabs"
  li  tabone
  li tabtwo
ul

dynamically from C# code behind I will hide or select some tab let say tabtwo
and the other tab has to be hidden or not shown. I can do this in JavaScript using .tabs({selected:1}); and .tabs(disable:0). but I don't want to use the tab indexes to do so.
Is there any alternate to select tabs based on their name/id?

A:

Accepted answer didn't work for me either, however I found solution in a similar thread:
Switch to selected tab by name in Jquery-UI Tabs
var index = $('#tabs a[href="#simple-tab-2"]').parent().index();
$('#tabs').tabs('select', index);

With jQuery UI >= 1.9:
var index = $('#tabs a[href="#simple-tab-2"]').parent().index();
$("#tabs").tabs("option", "active", index);

A:

Note: Due to changes made to jQuery 1.9 and jQuery UI, this answer is no longer the correct one. Please see @stankovski's answer below.
You need to find the tab's index first (which is just its position in a list) and then specifically select the tab using jQuery UI's provided select event (tabs->select).
var index = $('#tabs ul').index($('#tabId'));
$('#tabs ul').tabs('select', index);

Update: BTW - I do realize that this is (ultimately) still selecting by index. But, it doesn't require that you know the specific position of the tabs (particularly when they are dynamically generated as asked in the question).

A:

From the most recent document, the select method takes an index or the id of the tab's panel (the href hash value). The documentation states:

Select a tab, as if it were clicked. The second argument is the
  zero-based index of the tab to be selected or the id selector of the
  panel the tab is associated with (the tab's href fragment identifier,
  e.g. hash, points to the panel's id).

So, given a layout like 
<div id="myTabs">    
    <ul  class="tabs">
      <li><a href="#tabone">tabone</a></li>
      <li><a href="#tabtwo">tabtwo</a></li>
    </ul>   
</div>

the following works
$('#myTabs').tabs('select', '#tabtwo');

Here is an example.
UPDATE
The above solution works in jQuery UI versions less than 1.9. For a solution in versions 1.9+ see @stankovski's answer.

