Accelerating boyer moore searches on binary texts

Abstract

The Boyer and Moore (BM) pattern matching algorithm is considered as one of the best, but its performance is reduced on binary data. Yet, searching in binary texts has important applications, such as compressed matching. The paper shows how, by means of some precomputed tables, one may implement the BM algorithm also for the binary case without referring to bits, and processing only entire blocks such as bytes or words, thereby significantly reducing the number of comparisons. Empirical comparisons show that the new variant performs better than regular binary BM and even than BDM. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.