Benchmark: JavaScript search() vs indexOf()

Tests:

search()
const str = 'This is a test'; str.search('test');
indexOf()
const str = 'This is a test'; str.indexOf('test');

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
search()
indexOf()

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

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

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 131 on Windows

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
search()	7990057.0 Ops/sec
indexOf()	149205600.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 2 months ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark JSON and explain what's being tested.

**What is being tested?**

The benchmark compares two methods for searching a string in JavaScript: `str.search('test')` and `str.indexOf('test')`. These two methods are often used interchangeably, but they have different behaviors and performance characteristics.

**Options compared:**

* `search()`: This method returns the index of the first occurrence of the specified value. If no match is found, it returns -1.
* `indexOf()`: This method also returns the index of the first occurrence of the specified value. However, if no match is found, it returns -1 (similar to `search()`), but it can throw an error if the string is non-iterable or null.

**Pros and Cons:**

* **`search()`**:
	+ Pros:
		- More readable code, as it explicitly returns the index.
		- Can be more efficient for older browsers that don't support `indexOf()`.
	+ Cons:
		- May not be supported in all JavaScript environments (e.g., older versions of Internet Explorer).
		- Returns -1 if no match is found, which can lead to unexpected behavior.
* **`indexOf()`**:
	+ Pros:
		- More widely supported across modern browsers and JavaScript engines.
		- Can return -1 without throwing an error.
	+ Cons:
		- May not be as readable, as it returns a value directly.
		- Can throw errors in certain situations (e.g., non-iterable strings).

**Library usage:**

There is no library explicitly mentioned in the benchmark JSON. However, if we were to write this benchmark using a testing framework like Jest or Mocha, we might use libraries like `jsdom` for creating a virtual DOM environment.

**Special JS features or syntax:**

None are mentioned explicitly, but it's worth noting that these benchmarks assume a vanilla JavaScript execution environment without transpilation or polyfills. If we were to run this benchmark in a more complex environment (e.g., with modern browsers and ES modules), additional libraries or polyfills might be necessary.

**Other alternatives:**

If you wanted to test alternative methods for searching strings, some options could include:

* Using regular expressions (`str.indexOf()` is essentially equivalent)
* Implementing your own search algorithm using a loop
* Comparing the performance of `str.includes()` (which returns true if the string includes the specified value) against `str.search()` or `str.indexOf()`

To write this benchmark, you would need to create a JavaScript script that defines the test cases, then use a testing framework like Jest or Mocha to execute these tests and compare their performance.

Related benchmarks:

JavaScript search() vs indexOf() (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: search() vs indexOf()

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

search()

indexOf()

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 2 months ago):