Pattern matching

Abstract

An important subtask of the pattern discovery process is pattern matching, where the pattern sought is already known and we want to determine how often and where it occurs in a sequence. In this paper we review the most practical techniques to find patterns of different kinds. We show how regular expressions can be searched for with general techniques, and how simpler patterns can be dealt with more simply and efficiently. We consider exact as well as approximate pattern matching. Also we cover both sequential searching, where the sequence cannot be preprocessed, and indexed searching, where we have a data structure built over the sequence to speed up the search.