Split large string in n-size chunks in JavaScript

I created several faster variants which you can see on jsPerf. My favorite one is this:

function chunkSubstr(str, size) {
  const numChunks = Math.ceil(str.length / size)
  const chunks = new Array(numChunks)

  for (let i = 0, o = 0; i < numChunks; ++i, o += size) {
    chunks[i] = str.substr(o, size)
  }

  return chunks
}

You can do something like this:

"1234567890".match(/.{1,2}/g);
// Results in:
["12", "34", "56", "78", "90"]

The method will still work with strings whose size is not an exact multiple of the chunk-size:

"123456789".match(/.{1,2}/g);
// Results in:
["12", "34", "56", "78", "9"]

In general, for any string out of which you want to extract at-most n-sized substrings, you would do:

str.match(/.{1,n}/g); // Replace n with the size of the substring

If your string can contain newlines or carriage returns, you would do:

str.match(/(.|[\r\n]){1,n}/g); // Replace n with the size of the substring

As far as performance, I tried this out with approximately 10k characters and it took a little over a second on Chrome. YMMV.

This can also be used in a reusable function:

function chunkString(str, length) {
  return str.match(new RegExp('.{1,' + length + '}', 'g'));
}

• comparison of match, slice, substr and substring
• comparison of match and slice for different chunk sizes
• comparison of match and slice with small chunk size

Bottom line:

• match is very inefficient, slice is better, on Firefox substr/substring is better still
• match is even more inefficient for short strings (even with cached regex - probably due to regex parsing setup time)
• match is even more inefficient for large chunk size (probably due to inability to "jump")
• for longer strings with very small chunk size, match outperforms slice on older IE but still loses on all other systems
• jsperf rocks