This volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series provides a c- prehensive, state-of-the-art survey of recent advances in string processing and information retrieval. It includes invited and research papers presented at the 9th International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE2002, held in Lisbon, Portugal. SPIREhas its origins in the South Am- ican Workshop on String Processing which was first held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1993. Starting in 1998, the focus of the workshop was broadened to include the area of information retrieval due to its increasing relevance and its inter-relationship with the area of string processing. The call for papers for SPIRE2002 resulted in the submission of 54 papers from researchers around the world. Of these, 19 were selected for inclusion in the program (an acceptance rate of 35%). In addition, the Program Committee decided to accept six other papers, considered as describing interesting ongoing research, in the form of short papers. The authors of these 25 papers came from 18 different countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Chile, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Spain, United Kingdom, and USA).