Maximum-shift string matching algorithms

Abstract

The string matching algorithms have broad applications in many areas of computer sciences. These areas include operating systems, information retrieval, editors, Internet searching engines, security applications and biological applications. Two important factors used to evaluate the performance of the sequential string matching algorithms are number of attempts and total number of character comparisons during the matching process. This research proposes to integrate the good properties of three single string matching algorithms, Quick-Search, Zuh-Takaoka and Horspool, to produce hybrid string matching algorithm called Maximum-Shift algorithm. Three datasets are used to test the proposed algorithm, which are, DNA, Protein sequence and English text. The hybrid algorithm, Maximum-Shift, shows efficient results compared to four string matching algorithms, Quick-Search, Horspool, Smith and Berry-Ravindran, in terms of the number of attempts and the total number of character comparisons.