Benchmark: Intl.Collator.compare() vs Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation

Script Preparation code:

var a = "FOO BAR";
var b = "foo bar";

var options = {
  sensitivity: 'base',
};

var options2 = {
  sensitivity: 'base',
  ignorePunctuation: true
};

var collator = new Intl.Collator(undefined, options);
var collator2 = new Intl.Collator(undefined, options2);

Tests:

Intl.Collator.compare()
collator.compare(a, b) === 0
Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation
collator2.compare(a, b) === 0

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Intl.Collator.compare()
Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 21 days ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 131 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Intl.Collator.compare()	18734896.0 Ops/sec
Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation	17564140.0 Ops/sec

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

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

The benchmark provided examines the performance differences between two configurations of the `Intl.Collator.compare()` method in JavaScript, focusing on string comparison under different sensitivity settings. This method is part of the ECMAScript Internationalization API (i18n) and is used for comparing strings in a language-sensitive way.

### Benchmark Overview

#### Test Cases

1. **`Intl.Collator.compare()`**: This case uses a default configuration with `sensitivity: 'base'`. This means that the comparison is case-insensitive and diacritic-insensitive; thus, "FOO" would be treated as equal to "foo".

2. **`Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation`**: This case extends the sensitivity option by adding the `ignorePunctuation: true` flag. The additional option implies that punctuation is ignored in the comparison, which can affect the equivalence of strings longer than simple characters. In practice, "FOO BAR" and "foo bar" will still be treated equally, but any punctuation in the strings would not impact the comparison.

### Performance Metrics

The benchmark measures how many times each configuration can be executed in one second (Executions Per Second). The results indicate that both variants are capable of extensive comparisons, with:

- **With ignorePunctuation**: Approximately 3,168,622.25 executions per second.
- **Without ignorePunctuation**: Approximately 3,164,475.0 executions per second.

From these numbers, we can infer that the additional flag (`ignorePunctuation`) presents a negligible performance overhead in terms of execution speed.

### Pros and Cons

#### `Intl.Collator.compare()`
- **Pros**:
  - Simpler to use with fewer configuration options.
  - Generally sufficient for many applications where case sensitivity without punctuation is acceptable.

- **Cons**:
  - Does not accommodate cases where punctuation should influence comparison.
  - Can produce non-intuitive sorting results when punctuation is present in the strings.

#### `Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation`
- **Pros**:
  - More flexible for cases where punctuation might otherwise interfere with string comparison.
  - Ideal for user-facing applications, such as search functionalities, where users expect punctuation to be irrelevant.

- **Cons**:
  - Slightly more complex due to the additional option.
  - Minor performance overhead, although negligible based on benchmark results.

### Considerations and Alternatives

- **Alternate Libraries**: While `Intl.Collator` is a standard and widely supported method for localized string comparison, developers could consider other libraries such as `lodash` or `underscore.string` for specific use cases if they wish to perform additional manipulations or want functionality not provided by the native API.
  
- **Different Features**: If string comparison needs to consider other factors such as locale-specific rules, developers can utilize additional options provided by `Intl.Collator`, like `locale`, which adjusts the comparison based on the specified locale.

- **String Normalization**: In cases where Unicode characters might play a role (for example, accented characters), using `String.prototype.normalize()` prior to comparison might also be necessary, depending on the application's requirements.

In conclusion, this benchmark highlights the performance implications of considering additional comparison configurations in JavaScript, giving developers insights on how to choose between simplicity and flexibility in string comparison tasks.

Related benchmarks:

Intl.Collator.compare() vs Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: Intl.Collator.compare() vs Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation

Created: one month ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Intl.Collator.compare()

Intl.Collator.compare() with ignorePunctuation

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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