In this chapter, we consider the problem of searching for all the occurrences of a fixed string in a text. The methods described here are based on combinatorial properties. They apply when the string and the text are in central memory or when only a part of the text is in a memory buffer. Contrary to the solutions presented in the previous chapter, the search does not process the text in a strictly sequential way.

The algorithms of the chapter scan the text through a window having the same length as the pattern length. The process that consists in determining if the content of the window matches the string is called an attempt, following the sliding window mechanism described in Section 1.5. After the end of each attempt the window is shifted toward the end of the text. The executions of these algorithms are thus successions of attempts followed by shifts.

We consider algorithms that, during each attempt, perform the comparisons between letters of the string and of the window from right to left, that is to say, in the opposite direction of the usual reading direction. These algorithms match thus suffixes of the string inside the text. The interest of this technique is that during an attempt the algorithm accumulates information on the text that is possibly processed later on.