🚀 go-pugleaf

Two ways to speed up Javascripts are as follows. (This is evident for programmers but I had forgotten about it until I started using a script I wrote today that was much too slow to be of any use. The changes described here made it pretty fast so I thought I'd share this.) It appears to be a good idea to avoid repeated calls to ID values, and store an ID value in a user variable and use that instead. So instead of

par = app.selection[0].parentStory.paragraphs;
for( i = 0 ; i < par.length ; i++ )
   do something

You could also write this:

par = app.selection[0].parentStory.paragraphs;
parLength = par.length;
for( i = 0 ; i < parLength ; i++ )
   do something

in which the length of the array is stored in parLength, which is used instead of the repeated call to par.length. The difference? Running through a 500-word list doing something with the contents of each paragraph takes 2.7 seconds using the first method, but 1.2 seconds using the second method: the second method is more than twice as fast. In longer scripts that use lots of calls to e.g. the length of an array, or the contents of a line/selection, etc., the speed gain can be enormous.

Another, more modest, timesaver turns out to be to use lines whenever you can instead of paragraphs. So writing

par = app.selection[0].parentStory.lines;
parLength = par.length;
for( i = 0 ; i < parLength ; i++ )
   do something

takes off anothe 0.1 second. Not a lot, but when you process large amounts of data the difference begins to tell.

Peter