Search and Modification in Compressed Texts

Text compression techniques like bzip2 lack the possibility to search or to update substrings at given positions of texts that have been compressed without prior decompression of the compressed text. We have developed Indexed Reversible Transformation (IRT), a modified version of the Burrows-Wheeler-Transformation (BWT) that in combination with run length encoding (RLE) and wavelet trees (WT) allows for position-based searching and updating substrings of compressed texts without prior decompression of the compressed text. As a result, IRT may be useful for a huge class of applications that due to space limitations prefer to search or to modify compressed texts instead of uncompressed texts.