Benchmark: split vs slice date ranges for cally

Script Preparation code:

var date = "31/03/2025 - 06/03/2025";

Tests:

split
const [start, end] = date.split("/");
slice
const start = date.slice(0, 10); const end = date.slice(13, 23);
substring
const start = date.substring(0, 10); const end = date.substring(13, 23);

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
split
slice
substring

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0

Browser/OS: Chrome 134 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
split	11396031.0 Ops/sec
slice	59328740.0 Ops/sec
substring	56295652.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

The benchmark provided compares three different methods for extracting date ranges from a string in JavaScript: `split`, `slice`, and `substring`. Each method has its own approach and syntactical structure, aimed at achieving similar outcomes but differing in performance.

### Test Cases

1. **split**:
   - **Benchmark Definition**: `const [start, end] = date.split("/");`
   - **Description**: The `split` method takes a string and divides it into an array based on a specified delimiter—in this case, the `/`. The date string is split into parts corresponding to the start and end of the date range.
   - **Pros**: 
     - Simple and clear for delimiters; easily readable.
     - Automatically handles strings with varying segments.
   - **Cons**:
     - Performance can suffer with larger strings or more complex parsing requirements, as it processes the entire string.
     - Needs conversion from an array if you want specific indices.

2. **slice**:
   - **Benchmark Definition**: `const start = date.slice(0, 10); const end = date.slice(13, 23);`
   - **Description**: The `slice` method extracts a portion of the string based on specified start and end positions. Here, it pulls directly from the string to get the two dates.
   - **Pros**:
     - More efficient than `split` as it directly targets portions of the string without needing to handle the whole structure.
     - Predictable performance, especially for fixed-format strings.
   - **Cons**:
     - Requires knowledge of the exact positions to slice, which can lead to errors if the date format changes.

3. **substring**:
   - **Benchmark Definition**: `const start = date.substring(0, 10); const end = date.substring(13, 23);`
   - **Description**: Similar to `slice`, the `substring` method extracts parts of the string by specifying the start and end indices.
   - **Pros**:
     - Like `slice`, it is efficient and directly extracts segments from the string.
   - **Cons**:
     - While `slice` has more flexibility regarding negative indices, `substring` does not. Both methods can be similar in execution time, but `slice` may be slightly faster in some contexts.

### Benchmark Results Summary

According to the benchmark results:

- **slice** had the highest execution rate at **59,328,740 executions per second**.
- **substring** followed closely with **56,295,652 executions per second**.
- **split** lagged significantly behind at **11,396,031 executions per second**.

This indicates that for this particular implementation, both `slice` and `substring` outperform `split` significantly in terms of raw speed.

### Conclusion

From performance considerations, `slice` is often the preferred approach when the format of the string is well-defined, allowing for quick access to specific sections without the overhead of splitting the entire string. However, if the string format could change or be variable, `split` may offer a more versatile option, despite its slower performance.

Alternatives to these approaches also exist, such as using regular expressions (`RegExp`) for more complex parsing, but these can add additional overhead and complexity, typically resulting in worse performance for simple cases. Ultimately, the choice of method should be guided by the specific needs of the application regarding readability, performance, and flexibility.

Related benchmarks:

split vs slice date ranges for cally (version: 1)

Javascript split vs slice performance

Comparing performance of: split vs slice vs substring

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

split

slice

substring

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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