In computer science, a suffix array is a sorted array of all suffixes of a string. It is a data structure used, among others, in full text indices, data compression algorithms and within the field of bioinformatics.

Suffix arrays were introduced by Manber & Myers (1990) as a simple, space efficient alternative to suffix trees. They have independently been discovered by Gaston Gonnet in 1987 under the name PAT array (Gonnet, Baeza-Yates & Snider 1992).