Benchmark: RegExp search and replace vs URL and searchParams delete

HTML Preparation code:

<!--your preparation HTML code goes here-->

Script Preparation code:

var location_href = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2rvSf0STBM&list=RDCLAK5uy_kvhjcPWzH7xZL-WnqGbiA_euQGy5_cbHI&start_radio=1";
var location_search = "?v=x2rvSf0STBM&list=RDCLAK5uy_kvhjcPWzH7xZL-WnqGbiA_euQGy5_cbHI&start_radio=1";
var loop = 10000;
var loop_n = 3000;
var urls = new Array(loop_n).fill(0).map(()=>{
  let t = Math.round(Math.random()*80000+10000);
  return {
    href: `${location_href}${t}`,
    search: `${location_search}${t}`
  };
})

Tests:

Deletion with Url constructor and search params
for(let i=loop_n;--i;){ new URL(urls[i].href).searchParams.delete("start_radio"); }
Deletion with RegExp and replace
for(let i=loop_n;--i;){ const regex = new RegExp('[?|&]start_radio=\\d', ''); urls[i].href.replace(regex, '') }

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
Deletion with Url constructor and search params
Deletion with RegExp and replace

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 12 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
Deletion with Url constructor and search params	143.5 Ops/sec
Deletion with RegExp and replace	3467.1 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 12 days ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

The benchmark described compares the performance of two different methods for deleting the query parameter `start_radio` from a URL.

### Methods Compared

1. **Using the URL Constructor and searchParams.delete**:
   - **Implementation**: 
     ```javascript
     for(let i=loop_n;--i;){
         new URL(urls[i].href).searchParams.delete("start_radio");
     }
     ```
   - **Description**: This method creates a new `URL` object for each URL string and utilizes the built-in `searchParams` API to remove the `start_radio` parameter.

2. **Using Regular Expressions with String.replace**:
   - **Implementation**:
     ```javascript
     for(let i=loop_n;--i;){
         const regex = new RegExp('[?|&]start_radio=\\d', '');
         urls[i].href.replace(regex, '');
     }
     ```
   - **Description**: This method constructs a Regular Expression to identify the `start_radio` parameter in the query string and replaces it with an empty string to effectively remove it.

### Performance Results

- The benchmark results show the following executions per second:
  - **Deletion with RegExp and replace**: Approximately **3467.14 executions/sec**.
  - **Deletion with Url constructor and searchParams.delete**: Approximately **143.46 executions/sec**.

### Pros and Cons of Each Approach

1. **URL Constructor and searchParams.delete**:
   - **Pros**:
     - **Readability**: This method is more understandable, especially for those familiar with the URL API.
     - **Safety**: The URL constructor correctly parses the URL, ensuring the integrity of the URL format and handling edge cases.
   - **Cons**:
     - **Performance**: The creation of a new URL object for each iteration introduces performance overhead, making it slower in comparisons, particularly with numerous URLs.

2. **Regular Expressions with String.replace**:
   - **Pros**:
     - **Performance**: This method shows high performance in the benchmark as string operations with RegExp are generally faster than creating objects.
     - **Flexibility**: Regular Expressions can be tailored to match various formats and might permit more complex matching conditions.
   - **Cons**:
     - **Complexity**: Regular expressions can be more difficult to read and understand, especially for developers less familiar with them. Improper regex can lead to unintentional matches or bugs.
     - **Edge Cases**: This method risks failing on malformed URLs or if the query parameter is absent.

### Other Considerations

- The `URL` interface and `searchParams` API are modern JavaScript features that adhere to the URL specification, and they provide a clean, structured way to deal with URLs.
- The approach using Regular Expressions might not handle all possible edge cases effectively, especially with malformed or intricately structured URLs. It may require rigorous testing to ensure all scenarios are covered.

### Alternatives

- **Using URLSearchParams Directly**: Instead of creating a new URL object each time, you could extract the query string and manipulate it using the `URLSearchParams` API directly to enhance performance while avoiding the overhead of creating URL objects.
- **String Manipulation**: If performance is critical, consider manually manipulating strings without regex to achieve even faster implementations for specific, fixed patterns.
- **Third-party Libraries**: Libraries such as `query-string` or `qs` can provide utility functions to manipulate query strings flexibly and safely, with potentially better performance in batch scenarios.

In conclusion, the choice between these methods should consider the trade-offs between performance and code clarity, especially given the context in which they'll be used.

Related benchmarks:

RegExp search and replace vs URL and searchParams delete (version: 1)

Comparing performance of: Deletion with Url constructor and search params vs Deletion with RegExp and replace

Created: 12 days ago by: Registered User

Jump to the latest result

Deletion with Url constructor and search params

Deletion with RegExp and replace

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Experimental features:

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model gpt-4o-mini, generated 12 days ago):