Question

In another question I came across two different ways of doing a string replacement.

One being the jQuery way $("#element").text().replace(',', '.') and the other being the pure Javascript way of first getting the text and then calling .replace(/,/, '.').

Is there a big performance hit in using the jQuery method, or any other reason not to use it (assuming you already have jQuery on the page)?

Answer 1

These are both essentially the same method.

$('#element').text() returns a string, so you’re calling String.prototype.replace() in both examples.

The only difference I can see is that in the first method, you are using a string for the replacement, and in the 2nd, you are using a regular expression. In the examples you gave, the string method will be faster:

http://jsperf.com/string-replace-vs-regexp

If you really want to get the best performance, I’d suggest using pure JavaScript:

document.getElementById( 'element' ).innerText.replace( ',', '.' )