Fast string matching algorithm based on the skip algorithm

Abstract

String matching is a fundamental problem in computer science. In order to gain higher performance online exact single pattern string matching algorithms, the authors improved the Skip algorithm which is a comparison based exact single pattern string matching algorithm. By introducing the q-grams method in the sliding window and the comparing window of Skip respectively, the branch prediction failure and the average branch cost are reduced. Meanwhile, the greedy jump method is introduced in Skip. Greedy jump is a common accelerating method for string matching, while there are some waste reads for algorithms with unfixed jump distance. Since Skip has fixed jump distance, greedy jump is more suitable for Skip. Therefore, the authors presented the HGQS algorithm. Experiments results have indicated that HGQS has higher practical performance and it is more efficient in some cases than other known algorithms in many cases on the platform. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York.