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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20

Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions

Authors: Hideo Bannai, Philip Bille, Inge Li Gørtz, Gad M. Landau, Gonzalo Navarro, Nicola Prezza, Teresa Anna Steiner, and Simon Rumle Tarnow

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 331, 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)

Abstract

We study the problem of indexing a text T[1..n] ∈ Σⁿ so that, later, given a query regular expression pattern R of size m = |R|, we can report all the occ substrings T[i..j] of T matching R. The problem is known to be hard for arbitrary patterns R, so in this paper, we consider the following two types of patterns. (1) Character-class Kleene-star patterns of the form P₁ D^* P₂, where P₁ and P₂ are strings and D = {c₁, …, c_k} ⊂ Σ is a character-class (shorthand for the regular expression (c₁ | c₂ | ⋯ | c_k)) and (2) String Kleene-star patterns of the form P₁ P^* P₂ where P, P₁ and P₂ are strings. In case (1), we describe an index of O(nlog^{1+ε}n) space (for any constant ε > 0) solving queries in time O(m + log n/log log n + occ) on constant-sized alphabets. We also describe a general solution for any alphabet size. This result is conditioned on the existence of an anchor: a character of P₁P₂ that does not belong to D. We justify this assumption by proving that no efficient indexing solution can exist if an anchor is not present unless the Set Disjointness Conjecture fails. In case (2), we describe an index of size O(n) answering queries in time O(m + (occ+1)log^{ε}n) on any alphabet size.

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Hideo Bannai, Philip Bille, Inge Li Gørtz, Gad M. Landau, Gonzalo Navarro, Nicola Prezza, Teresa Anna Steiner, and Simon Rumle Tarnow. Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions. In 36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 331, pp. 20:1-20:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{bannai_et_al:LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20,
  author =	{Bannai, Hideo and Bille, Philip and G{\o}rtz, Inge Li and Landau, Gad M. and Navarro, Gonzalo and Prezza, Nicola and Steiner, Teresa Anna and Tarnow, Simon Rumle},
  title =	{{Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions}},
  booktitle =	{36th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2025)},
  pages =	{20:1--20:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-369-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{331},
  editor =	{Bonizzoni, Paola and M\"{a}kinen, Veli},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231143},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.CPM.2025.20},
  annote =	{Keywords: Text indexing, regular expressions, data structures}
}

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Text Indexing for Simple Regular Expressions

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