String Searching and Sorting

Suffix arrays and trees

Jonas Ellert

IMADA - SDU Odense

2026-08-17
🚀 by Decker

Test quiz

    • Yes
    • No

Strings

  • we’ve always communicated with computers via strings
  • if anything, strings will only become more relevant (LLMs)

  • we consider the classic pattern matching problem:

  • search engines, operating systems, DNA analysis …

Some basics

  • length-\(n\) string \(=\) sequence of \(n\) symbols from some alphabet \(\Sigma\)
  • we assume that \(\Sigma\) is totally ordered
  • actually, we assume that \(\Sigma = \{1, \dots, n\}\)
  • otherwise, we can reduce the alphabet by sorting