Benchmark: Comparing response.json() and JSON.parse(response.text())

Tests:

response.json()
const showResult = result => console.log(result); const url = "https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis"; fetch(url) .then((response) => response.json()) .then(showResult)
JSON.parse()
const showResult = result => console.log(result); const url = "https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis"; fetch(url) .then((response) => response.text()) .then((text) => JSON.parse(text)) .then(showResult)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
response.json()
JSON.parse()

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_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 133 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
response.json()	29995.4 Ops/sec
JSON.parse()	28349.3 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 5 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

The benchmark in question compares two different methods of handling JSON data received from a network response in JavaScript: using `response.json()` versus using `JSON.parse(response.text())`.

### Test Options

1. **response.json()**
   - This method is part of the Fetch API and is designed to parse the response body to JSON. It returns a promise that resolves with the result of the parsing.
   - **Pros**: 
     - Simpler and cleaner syntax.
     - Automatically handles the conversion from JSON string to JavaScript object.
     - Generally more efficient as it operates as a part of the Fetch API's built-in methods.
   - **Cons**: 
     - Limited to response objects that contain JSON-formatted data. If the response is not JSON, it will throw an error.

2. **JSON.parse(response.text())**
   - In this approach, the response is first converted to text using `response.text()` and is then parsed using `JSON.parse()`.
   - **Pros**:
     - Provides flexibility if you need the raw text for other operations before parsing.
     - Works with any type of textual data, not just JSON.
   - **Cons**:
     - More verbose and potentially less efficient because it involves two separate operations: converting the response to text and then parsing it.
     - More room for error if the response is not valid JSON, resulting in compatibility issues with malformed JSON.

### Library and Features
This benchmark does not involve the use of external libraries but utilizes native JavaScript features, specifically the Fetch API and the built-in JSON methods.

- **Fetch API**: A modern API for making network requests, which returns promises. It is used here to retrieve data from a given URL.
- **Promise Handling**: Both test cases utilize JavaScript promises to handle asynchronous operations, allowing the code to wait for the network response without blocking the main thread.

### Alternatives
In addition to the provided methods, other alternatives could be considered for handling JSON responses:

1. **Axios**: A popular library for making HTTP requests that automatically handles response parsing. It can simplify error handling and support request cancellation.
2. **jQuery Ajax**: Older, but still widely used; jQuery provides methods like `$.getJSON()` which inherently parse JSON responses while managing the network request.
3. **XMLHttpRequest**: The traditional method for sending requests, which can also fetch data and parse JSON, albeit with more verbose code and callback management.

In conclusion, the benchmark highlights a comparison between two approaches to JSON parsing in JavaScript, informing developers about their respective efficiencies and use cases. The findings suggest that using `response.json()` is more efficient and concise for handling JSON responses compared to explicitly fetching the response as text and parsing it afterward.

Related benchmarks:

Comparing response.json() and JSON.parse(response.text()) (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: response.json() vs JSON.parse()

Created: 5 months ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

response.json()

JSON.parse()

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 5 months ago):