This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2008, held in Pisa, Italy, in June 2008. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers address all areas related to combinatorial pattern matching and its applications, such as coding and data compression, computational biology, data mining, information retrieval, natural language processing, pattern recognition, string algorithms, string processing in databases, symbolic computing and text searching.