Benchmark: Reading textContent vs. nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)

HTML Preparation code:

Reading textContent vs. nodeValue

Script Preparation code:

var div = document.getElementById('div');

Tests:

Read textContent
div.textContent
Read textContent (incl. optional chaining)
div?.textContent
Read nodeValue
div.firstChild.nodeValue
Read nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)
div?.firstChild?.nodeValue

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Read textContent
Read textContent (incl. optional chaining)
Read nodeValue
Read nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 27 days ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/130.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser/OS: Chrome 130 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
Read textContent	0.0 Ops/sec
Read textContent (incl. optional chaining)	108662648.0 Ops/sec
Read nodeValue	0.0 Ops/sec
Read nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)	109070080.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 26 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

This benchmark measures the performance of different methods for reading text content from a DOM element in a web page using JavaScript. Specifically, it compares `textContent` and `nodeValue`, while also evaluating how optional chaining affects the performance of these methods.

### Benchmark Options
The benchmark includes four test cases:

1. **Read textContent**: 
   - **Definition**: `div.textContent`
   - **Description**: This method retrieves the text content of an element by accessing the `textContent` property directly.

2. **Read textContent (incl. optional chaining)**: 
   - **Definition**: `div?.textContent`
   - **Description**: Here, the optional chaining operator (`?.`) is used to safely access `textContent`. If `div` is `null` or `undefined`, it will not throw an error but will return `undefined`.

3. **Read nodeValue**: 
   - **Definition**: `div.firstChild.nodeValue`
   - **Description**: This accesses the `nodeValue` of the first child of the `div`. This is typically used for text nodes.

4. **Read nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)**: 
   - **Definition**: `div?.firstChild?.nodeValue`
   - **Description**: Similar to the previous case but uses optional chaining to safely navigate to the `nodeValue`.

### Pros and Cons of Each Approach

- **Using `textContent`**:
  - **Pros**:
    - Simpler to use and typically understood as the preferred way to get plain text from an element.
    - Automatically retrieves text of all descendant nodes.
    - Can directly access the property without worrying about child nodes.
  - **Cons**:
    - Slightly less flexible if you specifically want to retrieve the text value of a particular node (e.g., if you're dealing with multiple child nodes).

- **Using `nodeValue`**:
  - **Pros**:
    - Provides more granularity as it allows you to access text content from specific nodes.
  - **Cons**:
    - Complexity increases as you must navigate the child node structure, which can lead to `null` references if not handled correctly.
    - If the first child is not a text node, `nodeValue` might return `null`.

- **Optional Chaining**:
  - **Pros**:
    - Prevents runtime errors when accessing properties of potentially `null` or `undefined` values.
    - Makes code cleaner and easier to read.
  - **Cons**:
    - Slight overhead in processing time due to the additional checks.

### Benchmark Results
From the results presented in the benchmark, the test case that used optional chaining with `nodeValue` had the highest execution rate (109,070,080 executions per second), suggesting efficient handling by the JavaScript engine. Both versions of `textContent`, including optional chaining, also performed well, while the direct accesses to `nodeValue` and `textContent` (without optional chaining) resulted in 0 executions, likely because the respective `div` element does not exist or lacks child nodes.

### Other Considerations
The different approaches also provide insights into how developers might choose to access DOM properties based on their requirements for safety, performance, and simplicity. In cases where there’s uncertainty about the existence of nodes, using optional chaining can greatly reduce issues in production code.

### Alternatives
- **Using libraries**: Libraries like jQuery, React, or Vue have built-in mechanisms to assist with DOM manipulation and can abstract away these concerns. They often manage null checks internally so the developer can focus on higher-level logic.
- **Text Nodes**: Developers might also consider using methods like `getElementsByClassName` or `querySelector`, depending on the specific needs of their application, for more complex DOM queries.
  
Overall, this benchmark serves as a comparative study of how JavaScript handles different methods of accessing text nodes, highlighting both performance implications and the practical usage of features like optional chaining.

Related benchmarks:

Reading textContent vs. nodeValue (incl. optional chaining) (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: Read textContent vs Read textContent (incl. optional chaining) vs Read nodeValue vs Read nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)

Created: 27 days ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

Read textContent

Read textContent (incl. optional chaining)

Read nodeValue

Read nodeValue (incl. optional chaining)

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 26 days ago):