This book constitutes the thoroughly referred post-workshop proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms, IWOCA 2012, held in Krishnankoil, Tamil Nadu, India, in July 2012.The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 88 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections in algorithms and data Structures, applications (including Bioinformatics, Networking, etc.), combinatorics of words and strings, combinatorial optimization, combinatorial enumeration, decompositions and combinatorial designs, complexity theory (structural and computational), computational biology and graph theory and combinatorics submissions.