Abstract

We introduce a family of simple and fast algorithms for solving the classical string matching problem, string matching with classes of symbols, don't care symbols and complement symbols, and multiple patterns. In addition we solve the same problems allowing up to k mismatches. Among the features of these algorithms are that they don't need to buffer the input, they are real time algorithms (for constant size patterns), and they are suitable to be implemented in hardware. 1 Introduction String searching is a very important component of many problems, including text editing, bibliographic retrieval, and symbol manipulation. Recent surveys of string searching can be found in [17, 4]. The string matching problem consists of finding all occurrences of a pattern of length m in a text of length n. We generalize the problem allowing "don't care" symbols, the complement of a symbol, and any finite class of symbols. We solve this problem for one or more patterns, with or without mismatches. Fo...

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