Incongruity-sensitive access to highly compressed strings

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Cicalese, Ferdinando, Lipták, Zsuzsanna, Gagie, Travis, Navarro, Gonzalo, Prezza, Nicola, Urbina, Cristian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Cicalese, Ferdinando
Lipták, Zsuzsanna
Gagie, Travis
Navarro, Gonzalo
Prezza, Nicola
Urbina, Cristian
author_facet Cicalese, Ferdinando
Lipták, Zsuzsanna
Gagie, Travis
Navarro, Gonzalo
Prezza, Nicola
Urbina, Cristian
contents Random access to highly compressed strings -- represented by straight-line programs or Lempel-Ziv parses, for example -- is a well-studied topic. Random access to such strings in strongly sublogarithmic time is impossible in the worst case, but previous authors have shown how to support faster access to specific characters and their neighbourhoods. In this paper we explore whether, since better compression can impede access, we can support faster access to relatively incompressible substrings of highly compressed strings. We first show how, given a run-length compressed straight-line program (RLSLP) of size $g_{rl}$ or a block tree of size $L$, we can build an $O (g_{rl})$-space or an $O (L)$-space data structure, respectively, that supports access to any character in time logarithmic in the length of the longest repeated substring containing that character. That is, the more incongruous a character is with respect to the characters around it in a certain sense, the faster we can support access to it. We then prove a similar but more powerful and sophisticated result for parsings in which phrases' sources do not overlap much larger phrases, with the query time depending also on the number of phrases we must copy from their sources to obtain the queried character.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04523
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Incongruity-sensitive access to highly compressed strings
Cicalese, Ferdinando
Lipták, Zsuzsanna
Gagie, Travis
Navarro, Gonzalo
Prezza, Nicola
Urbina, Cristian
Data Structures and Algorithms
Random access to highly compressed strings -- represented by straight-line programs or Lempel-Ziv parses, for example -- is a well-studied topic. Random access to such strings in strongly sublogarithmic time is impossible in the worst case, but previous authors have shown how to support faster access to specific characters and their neighbourhoods. In this paper we explore whether, since better compression can impede access, we can support faster access to relatively incompressible substrings of highly compressed strings. We first show how, given a run-length compressed straight-line program (RLSLP) of size $g_{rl}$ or a block tree of size $L$, we can build an $O (g_{rl})$-space or an $O (L)$-space data structure, respectively, that supports access to any character in time logarithmic in the length of the longest repeated substring containing that character. That is, the more incongruous a character is with respect to the characters around it in a certain sense, the faster we can support access to it. We then prove a similar but more powerful and sophisticated result for parsings in which phrases' sources do not overlap much larger phrases, with the query time depending also on the number of phrases we must copy from their sources to obtain the queried character.
title Incongruity-sensitive access to highly compressed strings
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04523