Thierry Lecroq

String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).

String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).

The book is intended for lectures on string processes and pattern matching in Master's courses of computer science and software engineering curricula. The details of algorithms are given with correctness proofs and complexity analysis, which make them ready to implement. Algorithms are described in a C-like language. The book is also a reference for students in computational linguistics or computational biology. It presents examples of questions related to the automatic processing of natural language, to the analysis of molecular sequences, and to the management of textual databases.

String matching is a very important subject in the wider domain of text processing. It consists of finding one, or more generally, all the occurrences of a string (more generally called a pattern) in a text.The Handbook of Exact String Matching Algorithms presents 38 methods for solving this problem. For each, it gives the main features, a description, its C code, an example and references.