What is the SetHorspool string searching algorithm with pseudo-code so it can be easily implemented in a language of choice?
This has been implemented in 2 libraries I have come across:
But there seem to be very little details of the algorithm available online to understand its working.
Reading the source code we can see that it is an extension of Horspool to find a match from a set of needle strings $S$, rather than matching a single needle string.
How it works is by representing the set $S$ as a trie. This allows you to efficiently check character by character whether starting at position $i$ any of the strings on the trie can be found in the haystack. And like in Boyer–Moore–Horspool, if a position $i$ of the haystack fails to match any of the strings in $S$, instead of simply trying $i' = i+1$, a smarter skip lookup table is used: $i' = i + T[\text{haystack}[i + |\text{needle}| - 1]]$.
The second difference is how $T$ is computed. Normally the pseudocode is as follows (from the Wikipedia article):
function preprocess(pattern)
T ← new table of |Σ| integers
for i from 0 to |Σ| exclusive
T[i] ← length(pattern)
for i from 0 to length(pattern) - 1 exclusive
T[pattern[i]] ← length(pattern) - 1 - i
return T
But in SetHorspool, the minimum safe skip considering all patterns is computed instead:
function preprocess(S)
T ← new table of |Σ| integers
for i from 0 to |Σ| exclusive
T[i] ← min(length(pattern) : pattern ∈ S)
for pattern in S
for i from 0 to length(pattern) - 1 exclusive
T[pattern[i]] ← min(T[pattern[i]], length(pattern) - 1 - i)
return T
