Patent ID: 8804852

Claim:
A method, in a data processing system, for decoding a variable length encoded data stream, comprising: receiving, by a decoder of the data processing system, an input line of data, wherein the input line of data is a portion of the variable length encoded data stream comprising a number of bytes of data of the variable length encoded data stream received during a single processor cycle; determining, by the decoder, an amount of bit spill over of the input line of data onto a next input line of data, wherein the amount of bit spill over is an amount of bits of a symbol, partially present in the input line of data, that is present in the next input line of data; aligning, by the decoder, the next input line of data to begin at an encoded symbol boundary based on the determined amount of bit spill over to generate an aligned next input line of data; tokenizing, by the decoder, the aligned next input line of data to generate a set of tokens, wherein each token corresponds to a symbol in the aligned next input line of data; and generating, by the decoder, an output word of data based on the set of tokens, wherein the output word of data corresponds to a word of data in the original set of data.