This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 26th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, CPM 2015, held on Ischia Island, Italy, in June/July 2015. The 34 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers address issues of searching and matching strings and more complicated patterns such as trees; regular expressions; graphs; point sets; and arrays. The goal is to derive combinatorial properties of such structures and to exploit these properties in order to achieve superior performance for the corresponding computational problems. The meeting also deals with problems in computational biology; data compression and data mining; coding; information retrieval; natural language processing; and pattern recognition.