gSACA-K fails on empty string about gsa-is

[felipelouza]

Hi, why do you need to handle empty strings? Or, do you just want that the algorithm checks if there is at least one empty string before start?
Thank you!

[votroto]

The simplest argument is that it violates the Robustness Principle. An even shallower reason is that, when using property based testing, an empty string is the first input the algorithm receives. One way or another an empty string is going to show up and, as it stands, every user is going to have to work around this limitation. If there is a clear and obvious way to solve this, it would be great if it was already implemented. :)

[votroto]

If you were asking about real life examples, then for example when checking ASCII documents some of them might be empty, in which case neither a crash nor an error message are desirable.

[felipelouza]

Ok, I understand. I will think if there is a trivial solution.

[felipelouza]

Hi, sorry the late reply. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to add support for empty strings, since the algorithm needs that each LMS-substring have size at least 3. I just added a macro to check if there is an empty string and return -2 (code).