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A string ${\displaystyle u}$  is a substring (or factor) of a string ${\displaystyle t}$  if there exists two strings ${\displaystyle p}$  and ${\displaystyle s}$  such that ${\displaystyle t=pus}$ . In particular, the empty string is a substring of every string.

Example: The string ${\displaystyle u=}$ ana is equal to substrings (and subsequences) of ${\displaystyle t=}$ banana at two different offsets:

banana
 |||||
 ana||
   |||
   ana

The first occurrence is obtained with ${\displaystyle p=}$ b and ${\displaystyle s=}$ na, while the second occurrence is obtained with ${\displaystyle p=}$ ban and ${\displaystyle s}$  being the empty string.

A substring of a string is a prefix of a suffix of the string, and equivalently a suffix of a prefix; for example, nan is a prefix of nana, which is in turn a suffix of banana. If ${\displaystyle u}$  is a substring of ${\displaystyle t}$ , it is also a subsequence, which is a more general concept. The occurrences of a given pattern in a given string can be found with a string searching algorithm. Finding the longest string which is equal to a substring of two or more strings is known as the longest common substring problem. In the mathematical literature, substrings are also called subwords (in America) or factors (in Europe).

A string ${\displaystyle p}$  is a prefix of a string ${\displaystyle t}$  if there exists a string ${\displaystyle s}$  such that ${\displaystyle t=ps}$ . A proper prefix of a string is not equal to the string itself; some sources^[3] in addition restrict a proper prefix to be non-empty. A prefix can be seen as a special case of a substring.

Example: The string ban is equal to a prefix (and substring and subsequence) of the string banana:

banana
|||
ban

The square subset symbol is sometimes used to indicate a prefix, so that ${\displaystyle p⊑<!--\; ⊑\; -->t}$  denotes that ${\displaystyle p}$  is a prefix of ${\displaystyle t}$ . This defines a binary relation on strings, called the prefix relation, which is a particular kind of prefix order.

A string ${\displaystyle s}$  is a suffix^[1] of a string ${\displaystyle t}$  if there exists a string ${\displaystyle p}$  such that ${\displaystyle t=ps}$ . A proper suffix of a string is not equal to the string itself. A more restricted interpretation is that it is also not empty.^[1] A suffix can be seen as a special case of a substring.

Example: The string nana is equal to a suffix (and substring and subsequence) of the string banana:

banana
  ||||
  nana

A suffix tree for a string is a trie data structure that represents all of its suffixes. Suffix trees have large numbers of applications in string algorithms. The suffix array is a simplified version of this data structure that lists the start positions of the suffixes in alphabetically sorted order; it has many of the same applications.

A border is suffix and prefix of the same string, e.g. "bab" is a border of "babab" (and also of "baboon eating a kebab").^{[citation needed]}

A superstring of a finite set ${\displaystyle P}$  of strings is a single string that contains every string in ${\displaystyle P}$  as a substring. For example, ${\displaystyle \text{bcclabccefab}}$  is a superstring of ${\displaystyle P=\{\text{abcc},\text{efab},\text{bccla}\}}$ , and ${\displaystyle \text{efabccla}}$  is a shorter one. Concatenating all members of ${\displaystyle P}$ , in arbitrary order, always obtains a trivial superstring of ${\displaystyle P}$ . Finding superstrings whose length is as small as possible is a more interesting problem.

A string that contains every possible permutation of a specified character set is called a superpermutation.

• Brace notation
• Substring index
• Suffix automaton