This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Eighth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 97, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in June/July 1997.The volume presents 20 revised full papers carefully selected from 32 submissions received; also included are abstracts of two invited contributions. The volume is devoted to the issue of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns, such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets and arrays. The results presented are particularly relevant to molecular biology, but also to information retrieval, pattern recognition, compiling, data compression and program analysis.