Method and Apparatus for Speeding Up ACL Rule Lookups That Include TCP/UDP Port Ranges in the Rules

A hardware access control list (ACL) table is used to evaluate a received network packet to identify a first rule key portion in the hardware ACL table having a first address range indicator value that matches with an address value in the network packet, and the first rule key portion is then used to search a software-maintained list of extended check nodes linked with the first rule key portion to identify a first extended check node having a first address range value that matches with the address value in the network packet and to select one or more actions contained in the first extended check node to be performed by the networking element.