Question

There have been numerous posts on string algorithms:

• Algorithm to find articles with similar text,
• Similar String algorithm,
• Efficient string matching algorithm

However, no general literature was mentioned.

Could anyone recommend a book(s) that would thoroughly explore various string algorithms?
The topic which is of special interest is approximate string matching [things like google-offered corrected search string variants 🙂 ].

Thanks a lot for advice.

Answer 1

I’m surprised no-one has mentioned Dan Gusfield’s excellent book Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences which covers string algorithms in more detail than anyone would probably need. It served me very well for a project on protein sequencing that I was working on a few years ago. After reading this book you will learn:

• Naive String Matching
• Preprocessor Based algorithms (Boyer Moore, Knuth-Morris-Pratt)
• Regex matching algorithms
• Karp-Rabin and similar methods
• Suffix tree methods (Ukkonen’s method, etc)
• Sequence alignment (Levenshtein distance and string similarity, and multiple sequence alignment)
• Applications to DNA sequencing, gene prediction and other areas.