Rank and select revisited and extended

The deep connection between the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) and the so-called rank and select data structures for symbol sequences is the basis of most successful approaches to compressed text indexing. Rank of a symbol at a given position equals the number of times the symbol appears in the corresponding prefix of the sequence. Select is the inverse, retrieving the positions of the symbol occurrences. It has been shown that improvements to rank/select algorithms, in combination with the BWT, turn into improved compressed text indexes.