HARDWARE PARSER ACCELERATOR

Dedicated hardware is employed to perform parsing of documents such as XML"" documents in much reduced time while removing a substantial processing burden from the host CPU.The conventional use of a state table is divided into a character palette, a state table in abbreviated form, and a next state palette. The palettes may be implemented in dedicated high speed memory and a cache arrangement may be used to accelerate accesses to the abbreviated state table. Processing is performed in parallel pipelines which may be partially concurrent. Dedicated registers may be updated in parallel as well and strings of special characters of arbitrary length accommodated by a character palette skip feature under control of a flag bit to further accelerate parsing of a document.