Top 6 ways to search for a string in JavaScript — And performance benchmarks
Searching for a sub-string in a string, is one of the most basic operations, that we come across every now and then, and what I usually do…
Top 6 ways to search for a string in JavaScript — And performance benchmarks
Searching for a sub-string in a string, is one of the most basic operations, that we come across every now and then, and what I usually do is, to look into other places in the code and see what others have done and just do the same thing!
Now, I just wanted to bring up some of the most used options that are out there, as well as a performance comparison between them, in case you care about performance, so when it comes to choosing in the future, you know which one is a better choice!
Show me some code
The following are 6 different ways that I have seen a lot when searching for strings:
Performance Benchmark
In case you are wondering which one will perform better if the string is too big, ‘regex.test’ is the fastest, followed by ‘string.search’ from ES6 libraries, and the third place belongs to string.indexof:
The following is the Url for the JavaScript benchmark if you are interested to play with it:
When I changed the benchmark a bit and made the main string 10 times bigger, with the ‘sub-string’ bein repeated 10 times, I see that the regex.test still wins, followed really closely by the string.indexof, and string.search.
What happens if you scale it up?
I scale the string, and make it 1000 times bigger (1 million characters, or even 10 million characters), I see that string.indexof is a winner, not by much though!
Here is the result followed by the benchmark, when I made the string, 1 to 10 million characters:
Benchmark for a very big string and repeating the sub-string 1000 times:
Cheers!