An efficient algorithm for the All Pairs Suffix-Prefix Problem

For a pair of strings (S1, S2), define the suffix-prefix match of (S1, S2) to be the longest suffix of string S1 that matches a prefix of string S2. The following problem is considered in this paper. Given a collection of strings S1, S2,...,Sk of total length m, find the suffix-prefix match for each of the k(k - 1) ordered pairs of strings. We present an algorithm that solves the problem in O(m + k2) time, for any fixed alphabet. Since the size of the input is Ω(m) and the size of the output is Ω(k2) this solution is optimal. © 1992.