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Multi-pattern matching algorithm with wildcards based on bit-parallelism

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Wuhan University Journal of Natural Sciences

Abstract

Multi-pattern matching with wildcards is a problem of finding the occurrence of all patterns in a pattern set {p 1, …, p k} in a given text t. If the percentage of wildcards in pattern set is not high, this problem can be solved using finite automata. We introduce a multi-pattern matching algorithm with a fixed number of wildcards to overcome the high percentage of the occurrence of wildcards in patterns. In our proposed method, patterns are matched as bit patterns using a sliding window approach. The window is a bit window that slides along the given text, matching against stored bit patterns. Matching process is executed using bit wise operations. The experimental results demonstrate that the percentage of wildcard occurrence does not affect the proposed algorithm’s performance and the proposed algorithm is more efficient than the algorithms based on the fast Fourier transform. The proposed algorithm is simple to implement and runs efficiently in O(n + d(n/σ)(m/w)) time, where n is text length, d is symbol distribution over k patterns, m is pattern length, and σ is alphabet size.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Jilin University, which has provided me with a full schoolarship and an excellent environment for my Ph.D. studies and research. In addition, I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to Dr. Zhang Meng for his continuous support and useful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, Jilin, China

    Ahmed A. F. Saif, Liang Hu & Jianfeng Chu

Authors
  1. Ahmed A. F. Saif
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  2. Liang Hu
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  3. Jianfeng Chu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Liang Hu.

Additional information

Foundation item: Supported by the European Framework Program (FP7) ( FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES), the National Sci-Tech Support Plan of China (2014BAH02F03)

Biography: Ahmed A. F. Saif, male, Ph.D. candidate, research directions: stringology, network security and algorithm design.

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Saif, A.A.F., Hu, L. & Chu, J. Multi-pattern matching algorithm with wildcards based on bit-parallelism. Wuhan Univ. J. Nat. Sci. 22, 178–184 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11859-017-1232-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11859-017-1232-7

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