The papers contained in this volume were presented at the 19th Annual S- posium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching (CPM 2008) held at the University of Pisa, Italy, June 18–20, 2008. All the papers presented at the conference are originalresearchcontributions on computational pattern matching and analysis. They were selected from 78 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at least three reviewers. The committee decided to accept 25 papers. The programme also includes three invited talks by Daniel M. Gus?eld from the University of California, Davis, USA, J. Ian Munro from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo! Research, USA. The objective of the annual CPM meetings is to provide an international forum for research in combinatorial pattern matching and related applications. It addresses issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated p- terns such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets, and arrays. The goal is to derive non-trivialcombinatorialproperties of suchstructures and to exploit these properties in order to either achieve superior performance for the cor- sponding computational problems or pinpoint conditions under which searches cannotbeperformede?ciently. Themeeting also dealswith problems incom- tational biology, data compression, data mining, coding, information retrieval, natural language processing and pattern recognition.