Run results for: Regex vs .indexOf vs .startsWith vs .substr

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.2 Safari/605.1.15

Browser: Safari 26

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.15.7

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 4 months ago

Test name	Executions per second
Regex	1363.6 Ops/sec
.indexOf	12052.6 Ops/sec

HTML Preparation code:

<div></div>

Script Preparation code:

window.regex = /^test/;
window.match = 'test';
var data = window.data = [];
const possible = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789";
var TOTAL_STRINGS = window.TOTAL_STRINGS = 100000;

function getRandomInt(max) {
  return Math.floor(Math.random() * max);
}

function makeRandomString(len) {
  var text = "";
  for( var i=0; i < len; i++ ) {
    text += possible.charAt(getRandomInt(possible.length));
  }
  return text;
}

while (data.length < TOTAL_STRINGS) {
  data.push(makeRandomString(getRandomInt(20)));
}

Tests:

Regex
var x = 0; var TOTAL_STRINGS = window.TOTAL_STRINGS; var data = window.data; var regex = window.regex; while (x < TOTAL_STRINGS) { const str = data[x]; regex.test(str); x += 1; }
.indexOf
var x = 0; var TOTAL_STRINGS = window.TOTAL_STRINGS; var data = window.data; var match = window.match; while (x < TOTAL_STRINGS) { const str = data[x]; str.indexOf(match) === 0; x += 1; }

Run results for: Regex vs .indexOf vs .startsWith vs .substr

Testing some things

Regex

.indexOf