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A simple and inefficient way to see where one string occurs inside another is to check at each index, one by one. First, we see if there is a copy of the needle starting at the first character of the haystack; if not, we look to see if there's a copy of the needle starting at the second character of the haystack, and so forth.
In computer science, the Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm (or KMP algorithm) is a string-searching algorithm that searches for occurrences of a "word" W within a main "text string" S by employing the observation that when a mismatch occurs, the word itself embodies sufficient information to determine where the next match could begin, thus bypassing re-examination of previously matched characters.
A naive string matching algorithm compares the given pattern against all positions in the given text. Each comparison takes time proportional to the length of the pattern, and the number of positions is proportional to the length of the text. Therefore, the worst-case time for such a method is proportional to the product of the two lengths.
P denotes the string to be searched for, called the pattern. Its length is m. S[i] denotes the character at index i of string S, counting from 1. S[i..j] denotes the substring of string S starting at index i and ending at j, inclusive. A prefix of S is a substring S[1..i] for some i in range [1, l], where l is the length of S.