Finding all indexes of a specified character within a string

When i benchmarked everything it seemed like regular expressions performed the best, so i came up with this

function indexesOf(string, regex) {
    var match,
        indexes = {};

    regex = new RegExp(regex);

    while (match = regex.exec(string)) {
        if (!indexes[match[0]]) indexes[match[0]] = [];
        indexes[match[0]].push(match.index);
    }

    return indexes;
}

you can do this

indexesOf('ssssss', /s/g);

which would return

{s: [0,1,2,3,4,5]}

i needed a very fast way to match multiple characters against large amounts of text so for example you could do this

indexesOf('dddddssssss', /s|d/g);

and you would get this

{d:[0,1,2,3,4], s:[5,6,7,8,9,10]}

this way you can get all the indexes of your matches in one go

function charPos(str, char) {
  return str
         .split("")
         .map(function (c, i) { if (c == char) return i; })
         .filter(function (v) { return v >= 0; });
}

charPos("scissors", "s");  // [0, 3, 4, 7]

Note that JavaScript counts from 0. Add +1 to i, if you must.

Using the native String.prototype.indexOf method to most efficiently find each offset.

function locations(substring,string){
  var a=[],i=-1;
  while((i=string.indexOf(substring,i+1)) >= 0) a.push(i);
  return a;
}

console.log(locations("s","scissors"));
//-> [0, 3, 4, 7]

This is a micro-optimization, however. For a simple and terse loop that will be fast enough:

// Produces the indices in reverse order; throw on a .reverse() if you want
for (var a=[],i=str.length;i--;) if (str[i]=="s") a.push(i);    

In fact, a native loop is faster on chrome that using indexOf!

A simple loop works well:

var str = "scissors";
var indices = [];
for(var i=0; i<str.length;i++) {
    if (str[i] === "s") indices.push(i);
}

Now, you indicate that you want 1,4,5,8. This will give you 0, 3, 4, 7 since indexes are zero-based. So you could add one:

if (str[i] === "s") indices.push(i+1);

and now it will give you your expected result.

A fiddle can be see here.

I don't think looping through the whole is terribly efficient

As far as performance goes, I don't think this is something that you need to be gravely worried about until you start hitting problems.

Here is a jsPerf test comparing various answers. In Safari 5.1, the IndexOf performs the best. In Chrome 19, the for loop is the fastest.