When a Dollar Makes a BWT

Abstract: The Burrows-Wheeler-Transform (BWT) is a reversible string transformation which plays a central role in text compression and is fundamental in many modern bioinformatics applications. The BWT is a permutation of the characters, which is in general better compressible and allows to answer several different query types more efficiently than the original string. It is easy to see that not every string is a BWT image, and exact characterizations of BWT images are known. We investigate a related combinatorial question. In many applications, a sentinel character dollar is added to mark the end of the string, and thus the BWT of a string ending with dollar contains exactly one dollar-character. Given a string w, we ask in which positions, if any, the dollar-character can be inserted to turn w into the BWT image of a word ending with dollar. We show that this depends only on the standard permutation of w and present a O(n log n)-time algorithm for identifying all such positions, improving on the naive quadratic time algorithm. We also give a combinatorial characterization of such positions and develop bounds on their number and value. This is an extended version of [Giuliani et al. ICTCS 2019].