COMP171
Fall 2005
String Matching
String matching 2
Pattern Matching
Given
a text string T[0..n-1] and a pattern
P[0..m-1], find all occurrences of the pattern
within the text.
Example:
T = 000010001010001 and P =
0001, the occurrences are:
first occurrence starts at T[1]
second occurrence starts at T[5]
third occurrence starts at T[11]
String matching 3
Nave algorithm
Worst-case running time = O(nm).
String matching 4
Boyer-Moore Algorithm
Basic
idea is simple.
We
match the pattern P against substrings in
the text string T from right to left.
We
align the pattern with the beginning of the
text string. Compare the characters starting
from the rightmost character of the pattern. If
fail, shift the pattern to the right, by how far?
String matching 5
Boyer-Moore Algorithm
Suppose we are comparing the last character P[m-1]
of the pattern with some character T[k] in the text.
Case (1): if the character T[k] does not appear in P at
all, we should shift P all the way to align P[0] with
T[k+1]
If P[m-1] T[k], then the pattern does not occur here
and match P[m-1] with T[k+m] again. This saves a lot of
character comparisons.
Case (2): if the character T[k] appears in P, then we
should shift P to align the rightmost occurrence of this
character in P with T[k].
String matching 6
Examples
Case (1)
Case (2)
Case (1)
String matching 7
If the last character P[m-1] of the pattern matches with
T[k], then we continue scanning P from right to left
and match with T.
If we find a complete match, we are done.
Otherwise (case (3)), whenever we fail to find a
complete match, we should always shift P to align the
next rightmost occurrence of P[m-1] in P with T[k] and
try again
Case (3)
Case (2)
Case (2)
String matching 8
Boyer-Moore algorithm
To implement, we need to find out for each character
c in the alphabet, the amount of shift needed if P[m-1]
aligns with the character c in the input text and they
dont match.
This takes O(m + A) time, where A is the number of possible characters.
Afterwards, matching P with substrings in T is very fast in practice.