Benchmark: JavaScript string split vs match using regex

Script Preparation code:

string = "This benchmark is testing if split or match is faster on a string using regex";
regex = /\S+/gi;

Tests:

split
string.split(regex)
match
string.match(regex)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
split
match

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: yesterday)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 135 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
split	1879215.9 Ops/sec
match	2594361.5 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 6 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark definition and test cases.

**Benchmark Definition:**
The benchmark is designed to compare the performance of two JavaScript methods: `string.split()` and `string.match()`, both using regular expressions (`regex`). The regular expression used is `/\\S+/gi`, which matches one or more non-whitespace characters (including newline) globally (`g` flag).

**Options Compared:**
The benchmark compares the execution time of:

1. `string.split(regex)`
2. `string.match(regex)`

**Pros and Cons of Approaches:**

* **Split Method:**
	+ Pros:
		- More intuitive for string splitting, as it explicitly returns an array of substrings.
	+ Cons:
		- May create unnecessary intermediate arrays, potentially leading to higher memory usage and slower performance in some cases.
* **Match Method:**
	+ Pros:
		- Returns the entire match as a string, which can be more convenient for certain use cases (e.g., accessing the matched text).
	+ Cons:
		- May require additional processing to extract the actual substring from the match result.

**Library and Purpose:**
There is no specific library used in this benchmark. The `string` and `regex` variables are built-in JavaScript primitives.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax:**
The regular expression `/\\S+/gi` uses:

* The `\S+` pattern, which matches one or more non-whitespace characters (equivalent to `[^\s]+`).
* The `g` flag, which enables global matching.
* The `i` flag, which makes the match case-insensitive.

**Other Considerations:**

* The benchmark only measures performance for two specific use cases, so the results may not be representative of all possible scenarios.
* The test cases do not account for other factors that might affect performance, such as string length or the complexity of the regular expression pattern.

**Alternatives:**
For this type of benchmark, alternatives could include:

* Comparing the performance of `string.split()` and `Array.prototype.slice()` (which can be more efficient in some cases).
* Using a different regular expression pattern to simulate different use cases.
* Adding additional variables or conditions to test how performance changes with varying input sizes, data types, or complexity.

Keep in mind that benchmarks should aim to isolate specific aspects of the code under test and provide meaningful results. In this case, the benchmark focuses on comparing two methods using regular expressions, making it a good starting point for testing performance in similar scenarios.

Related benchmarks:

JavaScript string split vs match using regex (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: split vs match

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

split

match

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 6 months ago):