Practical and Optimal String Matching

We develop a new exact bit-parallel string matching algorithm, based on the Shift-Or algorithm (Baeza-Yates & Gonnet, 1992). Assuming that the pattern representation fits into a single computer word, this algorithm has optimal O(n logσ m/m) average running time, as well as optimal O(n) worst case running time, where n, m and σ are the sizes of the text, the pattern, and the alphabet, respectively. We also study several implementation details. The experimental results show that our algorithm is the fastest in most of the cases where it can be applied, displacing even the long-standing BNDM (Navarro & Raffinot, 2000) family of algorithms. Finally, we show how to adapt our techniques for the Shift-Add algorithm (Baeza-Yates & Gonnet, 1992), obtaining optimal time for searching under Hamming distance.