Benchmark: RegEx.test vs. String.includes vs. String.match - 1

Script Preparation code:

var string = "asdfasdf::ddddd:: asdfasdf::sdadfasdf::";
var regex = /::\w+::/;

Tests:

RegEx.test
regex.test(string);
String.match
string.match(regex)

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
RegEx.test
String.match

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

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/108.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 108 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
RegEx.test	10788790.0 Ops/sec
String.match	9379367.0 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 and explain what's being tested.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark is comparing three approaches to test if a string contains a specific pattern: `regex.test()`, `string.includes()`, and `string.match()`.

**What are we testing?**

We're testing how efficient these three methods are for searching a regular expression in a given string.

**Options Compared**

1. **`regex.test(string)`**: This method tests if the entire input string matches the regular expression. It returns `true` if there is a match, and `false` otherwise.
2. **`string.includes(regex)`**: This method checks if the input string includes a substring that matches the regular expression. It returns `true` if the substring exists, and `false` otherwise.
3. **`string.match(regex)`**: This method returns an array containing all non-empty strings matched by the regular expression in the input string.

**Pros and Cons of each approach**

1. **`regex.test(string)`**:
	* Pros: Efficient for checking if the entire string matches the regex, as it only requires a single pass through the input.
	* Cons: May be slower than `includes()` or `match()` if the regex is not found, as it still performs a full match check.
2. **`string.includes(regex)`**:
	* Pros: Faster than `regex.test()` since it doesn't require a full match, but may return false positives (i.e., when there's no actual match).
	* Cons: May be slower for very large inputs, as the regex engine needs to search through the entire string.
3. **`string.match(regex)`**:
	* Pros: Returns an array of matches, which can be useful in certain scenarios.
	* Cons: May be slower than `regex.test()` or `includes()`, as it requires multiple passes through the input.

**Library and Special JS Features**

No special libraries or features are used in this benchmark.

**Other Considerations**

1. **Browser differences**: The benchmark is run on Chrome 108, which may not be representative of other browsers.
2. **Input string size**: The input string is generated using a specific pattern (`::\w+::/`), which might not be typical for most use cases.
3. **Regex engine optimizations**: Modern JavaScript engines (like V8) often have built-in optimizations for regex performance, which may affect the results.

**Alternatives**

Other approaches to test if a string contains a specific pattern include:

1. Using `string.indexOf()` or `string.lastIndexOf()` with a regular expression as the substring.
2. Implementing a custom searching algorithm using bitwise operations or character-by-character comparisons.
3. Using a third-party library like RegExP or StringSearch.

Keep in mind that these alternatives might have different trade-offs in terms of performance, readability, and maintainability.

Related benchmarks:

RegEx.test vs. String.includes vs. String.match - 1 (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: RegEx.test vs String.match

Created: one year ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

RegEx.test

String.match

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):