The present invention discloses a method and an apparatus for creating a pattern matching state machine and identifying a pattern, and relates to pattern matching technologies. The method includes: obtaining a sub-keyword field after division; generating a state transition (goto) function according to the sub-keyword field; generating a failure function of each state node according to the goto function; generating a next-hop goto function δ of each state node according to the goto function and the failure function; in the process of converting the failure chain, the entry with a failure transition to the initial state is not generated. Therefore, the storage content does not increase massively, the storage structure of the AC algorithm is optimized, and the processing speed of the AC algorithm is improved.