Aho-Corasick Algorithm

Jun 19, 2026Aditya948351

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The Aho-Corasick Algorithm is a powerful string-searching algorithm that locates elements of a finite set of strings (the dictionary/patterns) within an input text. Unlike algorithms that search for one pattern at a time, Aho-Corasick searches for all patterns simultaneously in $O(n + m + z)$ time, where $n$ is the length of the text, $m$ is the combined length of all patterns, and $z$ is the number of matching occurrences.

It accomplishes this by building a Trie with failure links and output links, converting the Trie into a directed acyclic graph/finite state machine.

Aho-Corasick Trie & Failure Links Visualizer

Patterns (comma-separated):

Search Text:

How Aho-Corasick Works

The algorithm consists of two main phases:

1. Trie Construction: All dictionary patterns are inserted into a standard Trie prefix tree.
2. Failure Links Construction: Broadly speaking, the failure link of a node represents the longest proper suffix of the prefix represented by that node which is also a prefix of some pattern in the Trie. This is built using a Breadth-First Search (BFS) traversal.
3. Searching: The text is parsed character-by-character. If no child matches the current character, the search follows the failure link, avoiding backtracking.

Complexity

• Pre-processing Time: $O(m)$ where $m$ is the sum of the lengths of all patterns.
• Matching/Search Time: $O(n + z)$ where $n$ is the length of the text and $z$ is the number of matches.
• Space Complexity: $O(m \times \Sigma)$ where $\Sigma$ is the size of the alphabet.