computer-go: help with a fast pattern matching utility requested

[mike polyakov <mvp9@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
I'm writing a Go program that needs to match a given subsection of the 
board to a list of predefined patterns.  both are converted to strings, so 
it becomes a 1-d problem.  The program is in C/C++.

a DFA is really the only option I see, but the question is how to construct 
it? I considered using flex, but its not quite what i need - instead of 
matching multiple tokens on one input, i need to match the whole input 
string to one or several patterns (each time from the beginning of the 
input).  Flex/lex is much too big for what I need - ie much slower, and I 
was hoping for a way to add/subtract patterns from the DFA w/o completely 
rebuilding it, if possible.
I considered using GNUgo's matching mechanism - but its too tied to their 
implementation and it doesn't allow modifying the dfa w/o rebuilding it.

If anyone knows of a utility to do this in C, I would greatly appreciate 
letting me know.  Please email directly to mvp9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
thanks,
Mike