Patent ID: 7689530

Claim:
An apparatus for use in traversing a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) for use in identifying matches to a series of regular expressions, the series of regular expressions including a first regular expression followed by a second regular expression, the DFA representing the first regular expressions and the second regular expression, the DFA including a plurality of convergent states and a plurality of divergent states, the plurality of divergent states including one or more divergent states forming one or more traversable paths from a particular state, corresponding to a first regular expression final state representing the matching of the first regular expression, to a divergent final state, representing the matching of the second regular expression, the apparatus comprising: means for traversing the DFA in response to an input string, the DFA configured to identity individual matching of the first regular expression and the second regular expression, and for masking said identification of matching the second regular expression if a particular state corresponding to the matching of the second regular expression is a divergent final state and the traversal from the state corresponding to the first-time matching of the first regular expression to the particular state includes only divergent states.