The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
May. 29, 2007
Filed:
Feb. 13, 2002
Silvano Gai, San Jose, CA (US);
Dante Malagrino, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Silvano Gai, San Jose, CA (US);
Dante Malagrino, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Cisco Technology, Inc., San Jose, CA (US);
Abstract
A system and method for searching data strings, such as network messages, for one or more predefined regular expressions is provided. Regular expressions are programmed into a pattern matching engine so that multiple characters, e.g., 32, of the data strings can be searched at the same time. The pattern matching engine includes a regular expression storage device having one or more content-addressable memories (CAMs) whose rows may be divided into sections. Each predefined regular expression is analyzed so as to identify the 'borders' within the regular expression. A border is preferably defined to exist at each occurrence of one or more predefined metacharacters, such as '.*', which finds any character zero, one or more times. The borders separate the regular expression into a sequence of sub-expressions each of which may be one or more characters in length. Each sub-expression is preferably programmed into a corresponding section of the pattern matching engine. The system may also be configured so as to search multiple regular expressions in parallel.