This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2002, held in Fukuoka, Japan, in July 2002. The 21 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers are devoted to current theoretical and computational aspects of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees, regular expressions, graphs, point sets, and arrays. Among the application fields are the World Wide Web, computational biology, computer vision, multimedia, information retrieval, data compression, and pattern recognition.