Benchmark: RegEx.test vs. String.includes vs. String.match with lowercase

Script Preparation code:

var string = "Hello world!";
var regex = /hello/;

Tests:

RegEx.test
regex.test(string.toLowerCase());
String.includes
string.toLowerCase().includes("hello");
String.match
string.toLowerCase().match("hello");

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 9 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 9 runs

String.includes

79.8M/s

RegEx.test

33.7M/s

String.match

9.7M/s

Fastest: String.includes (8.2x faster)

View exact numbers

✓ String.includes: 79,800,344 ops/sec
• RegEx.test: 33,680,112 ops/sec
• String.match: 9,673,724 ops/sec

Results show median performance across all community submissions. Run this benchmark yourself to verify on your device.

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
RegEx.test
String.includes
String.match

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 2 months ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:151.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/151.0

Browser/OS: Firefox 151 on Mac OS X 10.15

View result in a separate tab

String.includes

2175.1M/s

RegEx.test

50.0M/s

String.match

32.8M/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ String.includes	2,175,077,632 Ops/sec
RegEx.test	50,022,600 Ops/sec
String.match	32,797,294 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's dive into the explanation of the provided benchmark.

**Benchmark Purpose**

The benchmark measures the performance of three different approaches to test if a string contains a certain substring:

1. `String.includes()`
2. `RegExp.test()` with a case-insensitive flag
3. `String.match()` with a pattern that matches the substring

These methods are used to find a specific sequence of characters within a larger string.

**Options Compared**

The benchmark compares the performance of three different options:

* `String.includes()`: This method returns `true` if the specified value is found in the string, and `false` otherwise. It uses a linear search algorithm.
* `RegExp.test()` with a case-insensitive flag: This method tests if the regular expression matches the entire string, ignoring case differences. The flag is used to make the match case-insensitive.
* `String.match()`: This method returns an array of strings if the pattern is found anywhere in the string, or `null` otherwise. It uses a linear search algorithm.

**Pros and Cons**

Here are some pros and cons of each approach:

* `String.includes()`:
	+ Pros: Simple and widely supported.
	+ Cons: Linear search algorithm can be slow for large strings.
* `RegExp.test()` with a case-insensitive flag:
	+ Pros: Can match patterns more complex than simple substrings.
	+ Cons: Requires a regular expression, which can add overhead. The case-insensitive flag may not be desirable in all cases.
* `String.match()`: Not typically used for substring matching, as it returns an array of matches or `null`.

**Library Usage**

None of the provided benchmark tests use any external libraries.

**Special JavaScript Features/Syntax**

The benchmark uses two special JavaScript features:

1. `RegExp` objects: These are used to define regular expressions.
2. `String.toLowerCase()` and `string.toLowerCase()`: These methods convert a string to lowercase, which is used in the benchmark to ensure case-insensitive matching.

**Other Alternatives**

If you want to compare other approaches to substring matching, here are some alternatives:

* `indexOf()` method: This method returns the index of the first occurrence of the specified value, or `-1` if not found.
* `includes()`: This method is similar to `indexOf()`, but returns a boolean value instead of an index.

Note that these alternatives may have different performance characteristics and trade-offs compared to the methods tested in the benchmark.

RegEx.test vs. String.includes vs. String.match with lowercase (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: `RegEx.test vs String.includes vs String.match`

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

RegEx.test

String.includes

String.match

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 9 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 9 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):

RegEx.test vs. String.includes vs. String.match with lowercase (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: RegEx.test vs String.includes vs String.match

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Go to the latest result

RegEx.test

String.includes

String.match

Historical Performance Data aggregated from 9 community runs

Desktop Results:

Chrome 9 runs

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):

Related benchmarks

Comparing performance of: `RegEx.test vs String.includes vs String.match`