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System and method for performing regular expression matching with high parallelism

  • US 7,225,188 B1
  • Filed: 02/13/2002
  • Issued: 05/29/2007
  • Est. Priority Date: 02/13/2002
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A method for operating a pattern matching engine having a plurality of information storage entries with two or more regular expressions, each regular expression including a plurality of characters and each regular expression associated with a corresponding action to be applied when matching strings are found, the method comprising the steps of:

  • identifying one or more borders within each regular expression, the one or more borders separating the regular expression into a plurality of sub-expressions, each sub-expression having a plurality of sequential characters;

    loading each entry of the plurality of entries of the pattern matching engine with the plurality of the sequential characters from one of the sub-expressions of the plurality of sub-expressions, wherein the borders are defined by a predetermined sequence of regular expression metacharacters, and the entries stored in content addressable memory (CAM);

    applying a string from a network message to the entries of the pattern matching engine to search the string simultaneously in parallel for sub-expressions from each of the two or more regular expressions;

    determining that the sub-expressions of at least one regular expression match the string; and

    executing the corresponding action associated with that at least one regular expression on the network message.

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