Beginning Programming ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter IV.3. String Searching

Searching for data is one of the most common functions in writing a computer program. Most searching algorithms focus on searching a list of values, such as numbers or names. However, there's another specialized type of searching, which involves searching text.

Searching text poses unique problems. Although you can treat text as one long list of characters, you aren't necessarily searching for a discrete value, like the number 21 or the last name Smith. Instead, you may need to search a long list of text for a specific word or phrase, such as ant or cat food. Not only do you need to find a specific word or phrase, but you also may need to find that same word or phrase multiple times. Because of these differences, computer scientists have created a variety of searching algorithms specifically tailored for searching text.

Warning

Computers only recognize and manipulate numbers, so every computer represents characters as a universally recognized numeric code. Two common numeric codes include the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and Unicode. ASCII contains 256 codes that represent mostly Western characters whereas Unicode contains thousands of codes that represent languages as diverse as Arabic, Chinese, and Cyrillic. When searching for text, computers actually search for numeric codes that represent specific text, so text searching is ultimately about number searching.

Note

One of the most popular uses for text searching algorithms ...