A Fast Suffix Automata Based Algorithm for Exact Online String Matching

Abstract

Searching for all occurrences of a pattern in a text is a fundamental problem in computer science with applications in many other fields, like natural language processing, information retrieval and computational biology. Automata play a very important role in the design of efficient solutions for the exact string matching problem. In this paper we propose a new very simple solution which turns out to be very efficient in practical cases. It is based on a suitable factorization of the pattern and on a straightforward and light encoding of the suffix automaton. It turns out that on average the new technique leads to longer shift than that proposed by other known solutions which make use of suffix automata.