This volume contains the 22 papers accepted for presentationat the Third Annual Symposium on Combinatorial PatternMatching held April 29 to May 1, 1992, in Tucson, Arizona;it constitutes the first conference proceedings entirelydevoted to combinatorial pattern matching (CPM).CPM deals withissues of searching and matching of stringsand other more complicated patterns such as trees, regularexpressions, extended expressions, etc. in order to derivecombinatorial properties for such structures. As aninterdisciplinary field of growing interest, CPM is relatedto research in information retrieval, pattern recognition,compilers, data compression, and program analysis as well asto results, problems and methods from combinatorialmathematics and molecular biology.