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Suffix Tree




In Computer Science , a suffix tree (also called '''PAT tree''' or, in an earlier form, '''position tree''') is a certain data structure that presents the Suffixes of a given String in a way that allows for a particularly fast implementation of many important string operations.

The suffix tree for a string S is a Tree whose edges are labeled with strings, and such that each suffix of S corresponds to exactly one path from the tree's root to a leaf. It is thus a Radix Tree for the suffixes of S.

Constructing such a tree for the string S takes time and space linear in the length of S. Once constructed, several operations can be performed quickly, for instance locating a Substring in S, locating a substring if a certain number of mistakes are allowed, locating matches for a Regular Expression pattern etc. Suffix trees also provided one of the first linear-time solutions for the Longest Common Substring Problem . These speedups come at a cost: storing a string's suffix tree typically requires significantly more space than storing the string itself.


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