Suffix Array for Large Alphabet

Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) [3] is used as the major part in block compression which has good balance of speed and compression ratio. Suffix arrays are used in the coding phase of BWT and we focus on creating them for alphabet larger than 2^8 symbols. The motivation for this work has been software project XBW[4] - an application for compression of large XML files. The role of BWT is to reorder input before applying other algorithms. We describe and implement three families of algorithms for encoding. First is inspired by the work of Sadakane [10] and further improved by Larsson [8]. Second family includes algorithm by Seward [11] and algorithm by Itoh further improved by Kao [5]. Finally we present algorithm by Kärkkäinen and Sanders [6] for constructing suffix arrays in linear time