CHAPTER 5 - Algorithms for Finding Patterns in Strings

Abstract

This chapter discusses the algorithms for solving string-matching problems that have proven useful for text-editing and text-processing applications. String pattern matching is an important problem that occurs in many areas of science and information processing. In computing, it occurs naturally as part of data processing, text editing, term rewriting, lexical analysis, and information retrieval. Many text editors and programming languages have facilities for matching strings. In biology, string-matching problems arise in the analysis of nucleic acids and protein sequences, and in the investigation of molecular phylogeny. String matching is also one of the central and most widely studied problems in theoretical computer science. The simplest form of the problem is to locate an occurrence of a keyword as a substring in a sequence of characters, which is called the input string. For example, the input string queueing contains the keyword ueuei as a substring. Even for this problem, several innovative, theoretically interesting algorithms have been devised that run significantly faster than the obvious brute-force method.