Run results for: Traverse function vs NodeIterator vs TreeWalker - with TEXT and ELEMENT

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.0.1 Safari/605.1.15

Browser: Safari 18

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.15.7

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: one year ago

Test name	Executions per second
Traverse function	350431.7 Ops/sec
NodeIterator with filter function	173613.5 Ops/sec
NodeIterator with filter param	1352604.1 Ops/sec
TreeWalker with filter function	178108.9 Ops/sec
TreeWalker with filter param	1734327.6 Ops/sec

Script Preparation code:

// language=HTML
const html = `
    <div>
      <p>This is some random text.</p>
      <div>
        <p>This is more random text with <span>SPAN ELEMENT</span> inside.</p>
      </div>
    </div>
`;
const template = document.createElement('template');
template.innerHTML = html;

window.testTemplate = template;

window.testTraverse = function traverse(node, use) {
    if (!node) return;

    use(node);
    traverse(node.firstChild, use);
    traverse(node.nextSibling, use);
}

Tests:

Traverse function
const comments = []; testTraverse(testTemplate.content.firstChild, node => { if (node.nodeType === Node.ELEMENT_NODE | Node.TEXT_NODE) { comments.push(node); } });
NodeIterator with filter function
const nodeIterator = document.createNodeIterator( testTemplate.content, NodeFilter.SHOW_ALL, { acceptNode(node) { if (node.nodeType === Node.ELEMENT_NODE | Node.TEXT_NODE) { return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT; } return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT; } } ); const comments = []; while (nodeIterator.nextNode()) { comments.push(nodeIterator.currentNode); }
NodeIterator with filter param
const nodeIterator = document.createNodeIterator( testTemplate.content, NodeFilter.SHOW_ELEMENT | NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT ); const comments = []; while (nodeIterator.nextNode()) { comments.push(nodeIterator.currentNode); }
TreeWalker with filter function
const treeWalker = document.createTreeWalker( testTemplate.content, NodeFilter.SHOW_ALL, { acceptNode(node) { if (node.nodeType === Node.ELEMENT_NODE | Node.TEXT_NODE) { return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT; } return NodeFilter.FILTER_REJECT; } } ); const comments = []; while (treeWalker.nextNode()) { comments.push(treeWalker.currentNode); }
TreeWalker with filter param
const treeWalker = document.createTreeWalker( testTemplate.content, NodeFilter.SHOW_ELEMENT | NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT ); const comments = []; while (treeWalker.nextNode()) { comments.push(treeWalker.currentNode); }

Run results for: Traverse function vs NodeIterator vs TreeWalker - with TEXT and ELEMENT

Let's compare the speed of 3 different ways to traverse the DOM.

Traverse function

NodeIterator with filter function

NodeIterator with filter param

TreeWalker with filter function

TreeWalker with filter param