Benchmark: regex vs loop for word count

Tests:

for loop
function randomNumber(min, max) { const range = max - min; const randomNumber = Math.random() * range; return randomNumber + min; } function word(length) { let result = ""; const characters = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"; const charactersLength = characters.length; let counter = 0; while (counter < length) { result += characters.charAt(Math.floor(Math.random() * charactersLength)); counter += 1; } return result; } const sentences = []; let targetWords = 10_000; while (targetWords > 0) { const numWords = randomNumber(1, 20); const words = []; for (let i = 0; i < numWords; i++) { words.push(word(randomNumber(3, 7))); } sentences.push(words.join(Math.random() > 0.5 ? "\n" : " ")); targetWords -= numWords } function isWhitespace(c) { return c === " " || c === "\n"; } function countWords(s) { let count = 0; let onWhitespace = true; for (const c of s) { if (onWhitespace) { if (!isWhitespace(c)) { onWhitespace = false; count += 1; } } else if (isWhitespace(c)) { onWhitespace = true; } } return count; } sentences.map(countWords)
regex
function randomNumber(min, max) { const range = max - min; const randomNumber = Math.random() * range; return randomNumber + min; } function word(length) { let result = ""; const characters = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"; const charactersLength = characters.length; let counter = 0; while (counter < length) { result += characters.charAt(Math.floor(Math.random() * charactersLength)); counter += 1; } return result; } const sentences = []; let targetWords = 10_000; while (targetWords > 0) { const numWords = randomNumber(1, 20); const words = []; for (let i = 0; i < numWords; i++) { words.push(word(randomNumber(3, 7))); } sentences.push(words.join(Math.random() > 0.5 ? "\n" : " ")); targetWords -= numWords } const reg = new RegExp(/\S+/g) function countWords(string) { const words = string.match(reg); return words ? words.length : 0; } sentences.map(countWords)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
for loop
regex

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Measuring the performance of different approaches for word counting in JavaScript can be fascinating.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark consists of two test cases: "for loop" and "regex". Both test cases generate a large number of sentences with random words and then count the number of words in each sentence using different approaches.

**For Loop Approach**

In the "for loop" approach, a while loop is used to iterate over the generated sentences. For each sentence, a counter variable is initialized to 0, and then iterates over each character in the sentence. If the character is not a whitespace, the counter is incremented. This approach uses a simple iteration technique.

**Pros:**

1. Easy to understand and implement.
2. Does not require any additional libraries or dependencies.
3. Can be optimized for specific use cases (e.g., using caching).

**Cons:**

1. May be slower than other approaches due to the overhead of the while loop and character iteration.
2. Requires manual management of the counter variable.

**Regex Approach**

In the "regex" approach, a regular expression is used to match all non-whitespace characters in the sentence. The `match()` method returns an array of matches, and the length of this array is returned as the word count.

**Pros:**

1. Can be faster than the for loop approach due to the use of optimized regex engines.
2. Does not require manual iteration over characters.

**Cons:**

1. Requires a good understanding of regular expressions and their syntax.
2. May have performance issues if the regex is too complex or has many unnecessary anchors.

**Library Used:**

In both test cases, no specific libraries are used beyond the built-in JavaScript functions (e.g., `Math.random()`). However, it's worth noting that the use of regular expressions involves a small overhead due to the creation and compilation of the regex pattern.

**Special JS Features or Syntax:**

None of the approaches rely on any special JavaScript features or syntax beyond basic iteration techniques and function definitions.

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/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 112 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
for loop	53.5 Ops/sec
regex	53.3 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

regex vs loop for word count (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: for loop vs regex

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

for loop

regex

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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