This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM '96, held in Laguna Beach, California, USA, in June 1996.The 26 revised full papers included were selected from a total of 48 submissions; also included are two invited papers. Combinatorial pattern matching has become a full-fledged area of algorithmics with important applications in recent years. The book addresses all relevant aspects of combinatorial pattern matching and its importance in information retrieval, pattern recognition, compiling, data compression, program analysis, and molecular biology and thus describes the state of the art in the area.