This text provides an overview of the current state of pattern matching as seen by specialists who have devoted years of study to the field. It covers most of the basic principles and presents material from the frontier of research.

1. Off-Line Serial Exact String Searching ; 2. Off-Line Parallel Exact String Searching ; 3. On-Line String Searching ; 4. Serial Computations of Levenshtein Distances ; 5. Parallel Computations of Levenshtein Distances ; 6. Approximate String Searching ; 7. Dynamic Programming: Special Cases ; 8. Shortest Common Superstrings ; 9. Two Dimensional Matching ; 10. Suffix Tree Data Structures for Matrices ; 11. Tree Pattern Matching

"Anyone who has ever used an Internet search engine appreciates both the practical importance and the awesome power of pattern matching algorithms, which find a specific search string within a text file. Here, 11 chapters, which represent the combined work of 16 contributors, survey the state of the art. The focus of the chapters varies depending on whether authors treat serial or parallel algorithms, online searching or offline preprocessing (of either the search string or the text file), approximate matching or exact matching. . . . For upper-division undergraduate and graduate students."--Choice "The book is written by the best experts in the area and is an excellent text for specialists working in algorithmics on texts, which is a broad subarea of theoretical computer science not sufficiently covered in the literature. The book is a very welcome handbook covering basic algorithms and problems related to string/array/tree pattern-matching and should be highly recommended."--Mathematical Reviews "Anyone who has ever used an Internet search engine appreciates both the practical importance and the awesome power of pattern matching algorithms, which find a specific search string within a text file. Here, 11 chapters, which represent the combined work of 16 contributors, survey the state of the art. The focus of the chapters varies depending on whether authors treat serial or parallel algorithms, online searching or offline preprocessing (of either the search string or the text file), approximate matching or exact matching. . . . For upper-division undergraduate and graduate students."--Choice "The book is written by the best experts in the area and is an excellent text for specialists working in algorithmics on texts, which is a broad subarea of theoretical computer science not sufficiently covered in the literature. The book is a very welcome handbook covering basic algorithms and problems related to string/array/tree pattern-matching and should be highly recommended."--Mathematical Reviews