Benchmark: check if stirng is blank

Script Preparation code:

var value = '    fsajdf asdfjosa fjoiawejf oawjfoei jaosdjfsdjfo sfjos 2324234 sdf safjao j o        sdlfks dflks l      '

Tests:

regex
!value || /^\s*$/.test(value)
trim
!value?.trim().length

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
regex
trim

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: one year ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 130 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
regex	7285117.0 Ops/sec
trim	13500613.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated one year ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

The benchmark provided compares two different approaches for checking whether a string is blank. The two methods in question are:

1. **Using Regular Expression (Regex):**
   - **Benchmark Definition:** `!value || /^\s*$/.test(value)`
   - **Test Name:** "regex"
   - **Description:** This method first checks if the `value` is falsy (where `undefined`, `null`, and an empty string would return `true`). If the `value` is truthy, it checks if the string consists only of whitespace characters. The regular expression `/^\s*$/` matches a string that is either empty or contains only whitespace.

2. **Using String Trim Method:**
   - **Benchmark Definition:** `!value?.trim().length`
   - **Test Name:** "trim"
   - **Description:** This method also checks if the `value` is falsy. If it is truthy, it trims any leading and trailing whitespace from the string using the `trim()` method, and then checks if the resulting string has any length. If the length is zero, it indicates that the string was either empty or consisted entirely of whitespace.

### Comparison of Approaches

#### Pros and Cons

- **Regex Approach:**
  - **Pros:**
    - It is a single evaluation and can easily express complex conditions with a concise syntax.
    - The regex approach may be more readable for those familiar with regex patterns.
  - **Cons:**
    - Regular expressions can be less performant compared to string operations, particularly for very long strings since they require pattern matching.
    - For anyone not familiar with regular expressions, it may be less intuitive.
  
- **Trim Approach:**
  - **Pros:**
    - Leveraging the built-in `trim()` method is straightforward and often clearer for most developers.
    - Generally, it might provide better performance than regex for this specific task since it inherently strips whitespace without the overhead of pattern matching.
  - **Cons:**
    - The `trim()` method does not directly characterize empty strings or whitespace-only checks, so it may involve more processing steps which could potentially introduce overhead in some cases, though practically this is typically minimal.

### Benchmark Results

The benchmark results indicate that the **trim** method outperformed the **regex** method significantly:

- **Executions Per Second:**
  - **Trim Method:** 13,500,613.0 executions/second
  - **Regex Method:** 7,285,117.0 executions/second

This implies that, at least in the tested environment (Chrome on macOS), the string `trim` method is about 1.85 times faster than the regex approach for checking if a string is blank.

### Alternatives

Apart from the regex and `trim()` method, there are other alternatives for checking if a string is blank:

1. **Using Length Property:**
   - A simple check using the `length` of the string directly: `value.length === 0`.
   - This is efficient but doesn’t account for leading or trailing whitespace.

2. **Combining Conditions:**
   - You might also combine the checks like `(value === "" || value === null || value === undefined)`, which can be more verbose but very explicit.

3. **Third-party Libraries:**
   - Libraries such as Lodash (`_.isEmpty(value)`) can further abstract these checks but may add unnecessary overhead for a simple string check.

### Conclusion

In general, for checking if a string is blank, the **trim** method is preferable due to its performance advantage and readability. Regex can be useful but may not be the best tool for this simple task. The choice of method may ultimately depend on the specific requirements concerning performance, code clarity, and personal or team preference.

Related benchmarks:

check if stirng is blank (version: 1)

check if a string is blank or not regex vs trim

Comparing performance of: regex vs trim

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

regex

trim

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated one year ago):