The Exact String Matching Problem: a Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive experimental comparison of over 80 exact string matching algorithms, analyzing their performance across various alphabet sizes and pattern lengths to inform practical applications.

Contribution

It offers the first extensive experimental evaluation of all known string matching algorithms, highlighting their performance differences based on input characteristics.

Findings

Performance varies significantly with alphabet size.

Algorithm efficiency depends on pattern length.

Certain algorithms outperform others in specific scenarios.

Abstract

This paper addresses the online exact string matching problem which consists in finding all occurrences of a given pattern p in a text t. It is an extensively studied problem in computer science, mainly due to its direct applications to such diverse areas as text, image and signal processing, speech analysis and recognition, data compression, information retrieval, computational biology and chemistry. Since 1970 more than 80 string matching algorithms have been proposed, and more than 50% of them in the last ten years. In this note we present a comprehensive list of all string matching algorithms and present experimental results in order to compare them from a practical point of view. From our experimental evaluation it turns out that the performance of the algorithms are quite different for different alphabet sizes and pattern length.