  A degenerate symbol x* over an alphabet A is a non-empty subset of A, and a
sequence of such symbols is a degenerate string. A degenerate string is said to
be conservative if its number of non-solid symbols is upper-bounded by a fixed
positive constant k. We consider here the matching problem of conservative
degenerate strings and present the first linear-time algorithm that can find,
for given degenerate strings P* and T* of total length n containing k non-solid
symbols in total, the occurrences of P* in T* in O(nk) time.
