In computer science, the Rabin–Karp algorithm or Karp–Rabin algorithm is a string searching algorithm created by Richard M. Karp and Michael O. Rabin (1987) that uses hashing to find any one of a set of pattern strings in a text.
For text of length n and p patterns
of combined length m, its average and best case running time is
O(n + m) in space O(p), but its worst-case time is O(n * m).
A practical application of the algorithm is detecting plagiarism. Given source material, the algorithm can rapidly search through a paper for instances of sentences from the source material, ignoring details such as case and punctuation. Because of the abundance of the sought strings, single-string searching algorithms are impractical.