Patent ID: 8990232
Filing Date: 2015-03-24
Classification: G06F,H04L

Abstract:
1. A method of matching a stream of characters against a predetermined regular expression, implemented using computational hardware comprising at least two hardware engines, the at least two hardware engines comprising a lookup engine and a regex engine, the method comprising: obtaining a transition table representing the regular expression as a graph comprising one or more input-conditional state transition specifications not limited to single-character inputs; generating a lookup table based on the transition table, the lookup table containing exactly one entry for each state of a state machine, each entry specifying a number n of characters to obtain from the character stream, wherein n is a non-negative integer not limited to 0 or 1; initializing the state machine; executing the lookup engine operative to, at each state of the state machine, retrieve the n characters specified in the lookup table for that state, and provide the n characters to the regex engine; and executing the regex engine operative to, at each state of the state machine, perform one of: