Improved characters distance sampling for online and offline text searching

Sampled string matching is a very effective technique to reduce the search time for a pattern within a text at the cost of a small amount of additional memory, used for storing a partial index of the text. This approach has recently received some interest and has been applied to improve both online and offline string matching solutions, improving standard solutions by more than 50%. However, this improvement is currently only achievable in the case of texts on large-sized alphabets, and remains small (or absent) in the case of small-sized alphabets. In this article we propose an extension of the approach to text-sampling, known as Character Distance Sampling, to the case of small alphabets, obtaining an improvement of up to 98% compared to standard solutions in the case of online string matching. We also extend this approach to the case of offline string matching, introducing a sampled version of the suffix array, obtaining performances up to 5 times higher than the search obtained on the standard suffix array. Differently from what has been done by previous solutions, our idea is not based on the reduction of the number of indexed suffixes, but on the construction of the index directly on the sampled text.