Benchmark: Regex vs URL - MeasureThat.net

Tests:

regex
/^[a-z0-9]+([-.][a-z0-9]+)*\.[a-z]{2,18}$/.test("google.com")
URL
try { new URL('https://google.com'); } catch(e) { console.error(e); }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
regex
URL

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 26 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

Let's break down the provided benchmark and explain what is being tested, compared, and the pros and cons of each approach.

**Benchmark Overview**

The benchmark compares two approaches: using regular expressions (regex) to validate URLs and using the built-in `URL` constructor in JavaScript. The goal is to measure which approach is faster.

**Options Compared**

1. **Regex**: This option uses a regular expression to validate if a string is a valid URL.
2. **URL**: This option uses the built-in `URL` constructor to create a new instance from a given URL string, and checks for errors.

**Pros and Cons of Each Approach**

### Regex

Pros:

* Simple to implement
* Works well for simple validation rules
* Can be optimized with caching or memoization for repeated validations

Cons:

* Can be slow due to the complexity of regular expressions and the need for Unicode character matching
* May not cover all possible valid URL formats
* Requires expertise in regular expression syntax

### URL

Pros:

* Built-in support makes it easy to implement
* Faster than regex for complex validation rules
* Covers most valid URL formats according to the specification (RFC 3986)

Cons:

* May throw errors if the input is not a valid URL string
* Can be slower due to parsing and error handling mechanisms

**Library/Functionality Used**

In this benchmark, the `URL` constructor is used. The purpose of the `URL` constructor is to parse a URL string and return an object with various properties (e.g., protocol, hostname, pathname). This allows for easy validation and manipulation of URLs.

**Special JS Feature/Syntax**

No special JavaScript features or syntax are used in this benchmark. However, it's worth noting that modern browsers have optimized the `URL` constructor to handle common URL formats efficiently.

**Alternatives**

Other alternatives for validating URLs include:

1. **Libraries**: There are several libraries available for validating URLs, such as `url-regex` (a regex-based library) and `is-url`.
2. **Regex alternatives**: Some libraries or implementations use alternative regex patterns or techniques to improve performance, like `url-normalizer`.
3. **Browser-specific APIs**: Each browser has its own API for working with URLs, which can be used to validate URLs.

In summary, this benchmark provides a straightforward comparison between two approaches: using regular expressions and the built-in `URL` constructor in JavaScript. The results help developers understand which approach is faster for URL validation tasks.

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/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 119 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
regex	37763064.0 Ops/sec
URL	2407808.2 Ops/sec

Related benchmarks:

Regex vs URL (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: regex vs URL

Created: one year ago by: Registered User

Jump to the latest result

regex

URL

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated 26 days ago):