A New Linearizing Restriction in the Pattern Matching Problem

In the pattern matching problem, there can be a quadratic number of matching substrings in the size of a given text. The linearizing restriction finds, at most, a linear number of matching substrings. We first explore two well-known linearizing restriction rules, the longestmatch rule and the shortest-match substring search rule, and show that both rules give the same result when a pattern is an infix-free set even though they have different semantics. Then, we introduce a new linearizing restriction, the leftmost non-overlapping match rule that is suitable for find-and-replace operations in text searching, and propose an efficient algorithm when the pattern is a regular language according to the new match rule.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FCT
• Authors: Yo-Sub Han, Derick Wood
• Keywords: FCT 2005, Match Rule, Pattern Matching Problem, Well-known Linearizing Restriction