[robinhouston]

And then you could get into compressed indexes such as the FM-index, which represent a text in a form that is both (typically) smaller than the original, and also supports fast substring queries.

Suffix trees are cool, but they’re just the entry point to a world of wonderful data structures and algorithms.

[del_operator]

The Burrows-Wheeler transform was an interesting thing to see! When I used to teach at an immersive 3 month program for web dev we had a few weeks of playing with such arrays, trees, tries, dynamic programming, and text from Wikipedia.