King's College London

V -order is a global order on strings related to Unique Maximal Factorization Families (UMFFs), themselves generalizations of Lyndon words. V -order has recently been proposed as an alternative to lexicographic order in the computation of suffix arrays and in the suffix-sorting induced by the Burrows–Wheeler transform. Efficient V -ordering of strings thus becomes a matter of considerable interest. In this paper we discover several new combinatorial properties of V -order, then explore the computational consequences; in particular, a fast, simple on-line V -order comparison algorithm that requires no auxiliary data structures.