Crate aho_corasick

A library for finding occurrences of many patterns at once. This library provides multiple pattern search principally through an implementation of the Aho-Corasick algorithm, which builds a fast finite state machine for executing searches in linear time.

Additionally, this library provides a number of configuration options for building the automaton that permit controlling the space versus time trade off. Other features include simple ASCII case insensitive matching, finding overlapping matches, replacements, searching streams and even searching and replacing text in streams.

Finally, unlike all other (known) Aho-Corasick implementations, this one supports enabling leftmost-first or leftmost-longest match semantics, using a (seemingly) novel alternative construction algorithm. For more details on what match semantics means, see the MatchKind type.

Overview

This section gives a brief overview of the primary types in this crate:

• AhoCorasick is the primary type and represents an Aho-Corasick automaton. This is the type you use to execute searches.
• AhoCorasickBuilder can be used to build an Aho-Corasick automaton, and supports configuring a number of options.
• Match represents a single match reported by an Aho-Corasick automaton. Each match has two pieces of information: the pattern that matched and the start and end byte offsets corresponding to the position in the haystack at which it matched.

Additionally, the packed sub-module contains a lower level API for using fast vectorized routines for finding a small number of patterns in a haystack.

Example: basic searching

This example shows how to search for occurrences of multiple patterns simultaneously. Each match includes the pattern that matched along with the byte offsets of the match.

use aho_corasick::AhoCorasick;

let patterns = &["apple", "maple", "Snapple"];
let haystack = "Nobody likes maple in their apple flavored Snapple.";

let ac = AhoCorasick::new(patterns);
let mut matches = vec![];
for mat in ac.find_iter(haystack) {
    matches.push((mat.pattern(), mat.start(), mat.end()));
}
assert_eq!(matches, vec![
    (1, 13, 18),
    (0, 28, 33),
    (2, 43, 50),
]);

Example: case insensitivity

This is like the previous example, but matches Snapple case insensitively using AhoCorasickBuilder:

use aho_corasick::AhoCorasickBuilder;

let patterns = &["apple", "maple", "snapple"];
let haystack = "Nobody likes maple in their apple flavored Snapple.";

let ac = AhoCorasickBuilder::new()
    .ascii_case_insensitive(true)
    .build(patterns);
let mut matches = vec![];
for mat in ac.find_iter(haystack) {
    matches.push((mat.pattern(), mat.start(), mat.end()));
}
assert_eq!(matches, vec![
    (1, 13, 18),
    (0, 28, 33),
    (2, 43, 50),
]);

Example: replacing matches in a stream

This example shows how to execute a search and replace on a stream without loading the entire stream into memory first.

use aho_corasick::AhoCorasick;

let patterns = &["fox", "brown", "quick"];
let replace_with = &["sloth", "grey", "slow"];

// In a real example, these might be `std::fs::File`s instead. All you need to
// do is supply a pair of `std::io::Read` and `std::io::Write` implementations.
let rdr = "The quick brown fox.";
let mut wtr = vec![];

let ac = AhoCorasick::new(patterns);
ac.stream_replace_all(rdr.as_bytes(), &mut wtr, replace_with)?;
assert_eq!(b"The slow grey sloth.".to_vec(), wtr);

Example: finding the leftmost first match

In the textbook description of Aho-Corasick, its formulation is typically structured such that it reports all possible matches, even when they overlap with another. In many cases, overlapping matches may not be desired, such as the case of finding all successive non-overlapping matches like you might with a standard regular expression.

Unfortunately the “obvious” way to modify the Aho-Corasick algorithm to do this doesn’t always work in the expected way, since it will report matches as soon as they are seen. For example, consider matching the regex Samwise|Sam against the text Samwise. Most regex engines (that are Perl-like, or non-POSIX) will report Samwise as a match, but the standard Aho-Corasick algorithm modified for reporting non-overlapping matches will report Sam.

A novel contribution of this library is the ability to change the match semantics of Aho-Corasick (without additional search time overhead) such that Samwise is reported instead. For example, here’s the standard approach:

use aho_corasick::AhoCorasick;

let patterns = &["Samwise", "Sam"];
let haystack = "Samwise";

let ac = AhoCorasick::new(patterns);
let mat = ac.find(haystack).expect("should have a match");
assert_eq!("Sam", &haystack[mat.start()..mat.end()]);

And now here’s the leftmost-first version, which matches how a Perl-like regex will work:

use aho_corasick::{AhoCorasickBuilder, MatchKind};

let patterns = &["Samwise", "Sam"];
let haystack = "Samwise";

let ac = AhoCorasickBuilder::new()
    .match_kind(MatchKind::LeftmostFirst)
    .build(patterns);
let mat = ac.find(haystack).expect("should have a match");
assert_eq!("Samwise", &haystack[mat.start()..mat.end()]);

In addition to leftmost-first semantics, this library also supports leftmost-longest semantics, which match the POSIX behavior of a regular expression alternation. See MatchKind for more details.

Prefilters

While an Aho-Corasick automaton can perform admirably when compared to more naive solutions, it is generally slower than more specialized algorithms that are accelerated using vector instructions such as SIMD.

For that reason, this library will internally use a “prefilter” to attempt to accelerate searches when possible. Currently, this library has several different algorithms it might use depending on the patterns provided. Once the number of patterns gets too big, prefilters are no longer used.

While a prefilter is generally good to have on by default since it works well in the common case, it can lead to less predictable or even sub-optimal performance in some cases. For that reason, prefilters can be explicitly disabled via AhoCorasickBuilder::prefilter.

Modules

• packed
  A lower level API for packed multiple substring search, principally for a small number of patterns.

Structs

• AhoCorasick
  An automaton for searching multiple strings in linear time.
• AhoCorasickBuilder
  A builder for configuring an Aho-Corasick automaton.
• Error
  An error that occurred during the construction of an Aho-Corasick automaton.
• FindIter
  An iterator of non-overlapping matches in a particular haystack.
• FindOverlappingIter
  An iterator of overlapping matches in a particular haystack.
• Match
  A representation of a match reported by an Aho-Corasick automaton.
• StreamFindIter
  An iterator that reports Aho-Corasick matches in a stream.

Enums

• ErrorKind
  The kind of error that occurred.
• MatchKind
  A knob for controlling the match semantics of an Aho-Corasick automaton.

Traits

• StateID
  A trait describing the representation of an automaton’s state identifier.