Just wondering if you are aware of any C based extension in python that can help me construct suffix trees/arrays in linear time ?
You can checkout the following implementations.
http://www.daimi.au.dk/~mailund/suffix_tree.html
https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/suffix_trees/
https://github.com/kvh/Python-Suffix-Tree
A guy improved (first one) and put it here.
http://researchonsearch.blogspot.com/2010/05/suffix-tree-implementation-with-unicode.html
All are C implementations.