High Performance JavaScript

Chapter 5. Strings and Regular Expressions

Steven Levithan

Practically all JavaScript programs are intimately tied to strings. For example, many applications use Ajax to fetch strings from a server, convert those strings into more easily usable JavaScript objects, and then generate strings of HTML from the data. A typical program deals with numerous tasks like these that require you to merge, split, rearrange, search, iterate over, and otherwise handle strings; and as web applications become more complex, progressively more of this processing is done in the browser.

In JavaScript, regular expressions are essential for anything more than trivial string processing. A lot of this chapter is therefore dedicated to helping you understand how regular expression engines^[2] internally process your strings and showing you how to write regular expressions that take advantage of this knowledge.

Note

Since the term regular expression is a bit unwieldy, regex is often used for short, and regexes to denote the plural.

Also in this chapter, you’ll learn about the fastest cross-browser methods for concatenating and trimming strings, discover how to increase regex performance by reducing backtracking, and pick up plenty of other tips and tricks for efficiently processing strings and regular expressions.

String Concatenation

String concatenation can be surprisingly performance intensive. It’s a common task to build a string by continually adding to the end of it in a loop (e.g., when building up an HTML ...