Manber and Wu's original paper gives extensions of the algorithm to deal with fuzzy matching of general regular expressions.
The bitap algorithm for exact string searching was invented by Bálint Dömölki in 1964[1][2] and extended by R. K. Shyamasundar in 1977[3], before being reinvented by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Gaston Gonnet[4] in 1989 (one chapter of first author's PhD thesis[5]) which also extended it to handle classes of characters, wildcards, and mismatches.
Notice also that we require CHAR_MAX additional bitmasks in order to convert the (text[i] == pattern[k-1]) condition in the general implementation into bitwise operations.
To perform fuzzy string searching using the bitap algorithm, it is necessary to extend the bit array R into a second dimension.
However, it only pays attention to substitutions, not to insertions or deletions – in other words, a Hamming distance of k. As before, the semantics of 0 and 1 are reversed from their conventional meanings.