I am thinking about an effient algorithm for wildcard searching with * representing any characters with any length.

aa*c, she*he, *she*he

Example:

1. caa find aa*c

   return "DOES NOT EXIST"

2. hesherheshe find she*he return 2

   Because sherheshe begins at index 2

3. sherheshe find she*he return 0 Because the whole string When I am supposed to return, say, the beginning index of the first matching instance.

Say the pattern is of length M and the document is of length N, and the pattern has K '*' signs. I can think of a solution that first uses AC Automation to find all occurences of each chunk in O(N + M), with bitmask.

While converting the bitmask to indexes takes O(N * K)

Then binary search for the last possible beginning positions for each chunk. This could take O (K log N)

So the overall time complexity is still O (N * K), any way to do better?

References

https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/111380

https://mirror.codeforces.com/problemset/problem/1023/A

https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/127169