Efficient string matching algorithm

Question

I\'m trying to build an efficient string matching algorithm. This will execute in a high-volume environment, so performance is critical.

Here are my requirements:

Answer 1

Investigate the KMP (Knuth-Morris-Pratt) or BM (Boyer-Moore) algorithms. These allow you to search the string more quickly than linear time, at the cost of a little pre-processing. Dropping the leading asterisk is of course crucial, as others have noted.

One source of information for these is:

KMP: http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/node8.html

BM: http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/node14.html