Commentz-Walter algorithm

In computer science, the Commentz-Walter algorithm is a string searching algorithm invented by Beate Commentz-Walter. Like the Aho–Corasick string matching algorithm, it can search for multiple patterns at once. It combines ideas from Aho–Corasick with the fast matching of the Boyer–Moore string search algorithm. For a text of length n and maximum pattern length of m, its worst-case running time is O(mn), though the average case is often much better.^[1]

GNU grep implements a string matching algorithm very similar to Commentz-Walter.^[2]

References

Strings

String metric	Approximate string matching Bitap algorithm Damerau–Levenshtein distance Edit distance Hamming distance Jaro–Winkler distance Lee distance Levenshtein automaton Levenshtein distance Wagner–Fischer algorithm

String searching algorithm	Apostolico–Giancarlo algorithm Boyer–Moore string search algorithm Boyer–Moore–Horspool algorithm Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm Rabin–Karp string search algorithm

Multiple string searching	Aho–Corasick Commentz-Walter algorithm Rabin–Karp

Regular expression	Comparison of regular expression engines List of regular expression software Regular tree grammar Thompson's construction Nondeterministic finite automaton

Sequence alignment	Hirschberg's algorithm Needleman–Wunsch algorithm Smith–Waterman algorithm

Data structures	DAFSA Suffix array Suffix automaton Suffix tree Generalized suffix tree Rope Ternary search tree Trie

Other	Parsing Pattern matching Compressed pattern matching Longest common subsequence Longest common substring Sequential pattern mining Sorting