Comparing large strings in JavaScript with a hash

Question

I have a form with a textarea that can contain large amounts of content (say, articles for a blog) edited using one of a number of third party rich text editors. I\'m trying to

Answer 1

In short, you're better off just storing and comparing the two strings.

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Computing a proper hash is not cheap. For example, check out the pseudo code or an actual JavaScript implementation for computing the MD5 hash of a string. Furthermore, all proper hash implementations will require enumerating the characters of the string anyway.

Furthermore, in the context of modern computing, a string has to be really, really long before comparing it against another string is slow. What you're doing here is effectively a micro-optimization. Memory won't be an issue, nor will the CPU cycles to compare the two strings.

As with all cases of optimizing: check that this is actually a problem before you solve it. In a quick test I did, computing and comparing 2 MD5 sums took 382ms. Comparing the two strings directly took 0ms. This was using a string that was 10000 words long. See http://jsfiddle.net/DjM8S.

If you really see this as an issue, I would also strongly consider using a poor-mans comparison; and just comparing the length of the 2 strings, to see if they have changed or not, rather than actual string comparisons.

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