Faster run-length compressed suffix arrays

We first review how we can store a run-length compressed suffix array (RLCSA) for a text $T$ of length $n$ over an alphabet of size $\sigma$ whose Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT) consists of $r$ runs in $O \left( \rule{0ex}{2ex} r \log (n / r) + r \log \sigma + \sigma \right)$ bits such that later, given character $a$ and the suffix array interval for $P$, we can find the suffix-array (SA) interval for $a P$ in $O (\log r_a + \log \log n)$ time, where $r_a$ is the number of runs of copies of $a$ in the BWT. We then show how to modify the RLCSA such that we find the SA interval for $a P$ in only $O (\log r_a)$ time, without increasing its asymptotic space bound. Our key idea is applying a result by Nishimoto and Tabei (ICALP 2021) and then replacing rank queries on sparse bitvectors by a constant number of select queries. We also review two-level indexing and discuss how our faster RLCSA may be useful in improving it. Finally, we briefly discuss how two-level indexing may speed up a recent heuristic for finding maximal exact matches of a pattern with respect to an indexed text.