The first step is to choose the most suitable algorithm for your problem and data. There are many different types of string matching algorithms, such as exact, approximate, fuzzy, regex, or substring.

This is a very simple string matching algorithm written in C++ that uses a finite state machine and a trie to do the matching. Furthermore this is only a weekend project that I hacked on some time ago ...

Example implementations, in C and Java, of the Franek-Jennings-Smyth string matching algorithm. This is the fastest known algorithm for finding all occurrences of a pattern string within a text string ...