  The abelian pattern matching problem consists in finding all substrings of a
text which are permutations of a given pattern. This problem finds application
in many areas and can be solved in linear time by a naive sliding window
approach. In this short communication we present a new class of algorithms
based on a new efficient fingerprint computation approach, called
Heap-Counting, which turns out to be fast, flexible and easy to be implemented.
It can be proved that our solutions have a linear worst case time complexity
and, in addition, we present an extensive experimental evaluation which shows
that our newly presented algorithms are among the most efficient and flexible
solutions in practice for the abelian matching problem in strings.
