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The compact directed acyclic word graph (CDAWG) is the minimal compact automaton that recognizes all the suffixes of a string. Classically the CDAWG has been implemented as an index of the string it recognizes, requiring $o(n)$ space for a copy of the string $T$ being indexed, where $n=|T|$. In this work, we propose using the CDAWG as an index for grammar-compressed strings. While this enables all analyses supported by the CDAWG on any grammar-compressed string, in this work we specifically consider pattern matching. Using the CDAWG index, pattern matching can be performed on any grammar-compressed string in $\mathcal{O}(\text{ra}(m)+\text{occ})$ time while requiring only $\mathcal{O}(\text{er}(T))$ additional space, where $m$ is the length of the pattern, $\text{ra}(m)$ is the grammar random access time, $\text{occ}$ is the number of occurrences of the pattern in $T$, and $\text{er}(T)$ is the number of right-extensions of the maximal repeats in $T$. Our experiments show that even when using a na\"ive random access algorithm, the CDAWG index achieves state of the art run-time performance for pattern matching on grammar-compressed strings. Additionally, we find that all of the grammars computed for our experiments are smaller than the number of right-extensions in the string they produce and, thus, their CDAWGs are within the best known $\mathcal{O}(\text{er}(T))$ space asymptotic bound.

Grammar-based compression is a widely-accepted model of string compression that allows for efficient and direct manipulations on the compressed data. Most, if not all, such manipulations rely on the primitive \emph{random access} queries, a task of quickly returning the character at a specified position of the original uncompressed string without explicit decompression. While there are advanced data structures for random access to grammar-compressed strings that guarantee theoretical query time and space bounds, little has been done for the \emph{practical} perspective of this important problem. In this paper, we revisit a well-known folklore random access algorithm for grammars in the Chomsky normal form, modify it to work directly on general grammars, and show that this modified version is fast and memory efficient in practice.