The KMP (Knuth-Morris-Pratt) algorithm is an efficient string matching algorithm that searches for occurrences of a word within a main text string. It improves upon the naive algorithm by avoiding unnecessary comparisons after a mismatch. The core idea behind KMP is to use information gained from previous character comparisons to skip sections of the text that are guaranteed not to match. This is achieved through a preprocessing step that constructs a longest prefix-suffix (LPS) array, which indicates the longest proper prefix of the substring that is also a suffix. As a result, the KMP algorithm runs in linear time, specifically , where is the length of the text and is the length of the pattern.
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