Programming Praxis

The two previous exercises discussed the brute-force and Knuth-Morris-Pratt algoritms for searching strings. Today we discuss the Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, invented by Bob Boyer and J Strother Moore in 1977, in a variant devised by Nigel Horspool.

The Boyer-Moore algorithm is a “backwards” version of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. It looks at the last character of the pattern first, working its way right-to-left until it finds a mis-match, when it slides the pattern right along the search string for a skip size based on the current character.

Consider the pattern ABABAC, the same pattern used in the prior exercise. The skip array is:

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