String matching is one of computing’s fundamental problems: given a pattern of length m and a text of length n, find all occurrences of the pattern within the text. The naive approach—sliding the…
Read more →Wildcard pattern matching is everywhere. When you type *.txt in your terminal, use SELECT * FROM in SQL, or configure ignore patterns in .gitignore, you’re using wildcard matching. The problem…
You have a list of 10,000 banned words and need to scan every user comment for violations. The naive approach—running a single-pattern search algorithm 10,000 times per comment—is computationally…
Read more →Pattern matching is one of Rust’s most powerful features, fundamentally different from the switch statements you’ve used in C, Java, or JavaScript. While a switch statement simply compares values,…
Read more →Regular expression matching with . (matches any single character) and * (matches zero or more of the preceding element) is a classic dynamic programming problem. Given a string text and a…
Pattern matching is one of those features that, once you’ve used it properly, makes you wonder how you ever lived without it. At its core, pattern matching is a control flow mechanism that…
Read more →You need to scan a document for 10,000 banned words. Or detect any of 50,000 malware signatures in a binary. Or find all occurrences of thousands of DNA motifs in a genome. The naive approach—running…
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