VARIABLE-LENGTH HEADERS

The techniques disclosed herein enhance the functionality of computer networking devices through an accelerated packet header analysis algorithm that enables support for variable length headers and vectorized packet header operations. This is accomplished through pre-parsing of the network packet to determine the presence and position of various packet headers (e.g., ethernet, IPv4). The disclosed system can be subsequently configured with a header selector defining a set of target packet headers and target fields within the packet headers. The disclosed system can then utilize the header offsets derived from parsing the packet to process the header selector. By utilizing vectorized operations to calculate field offsets and extract values encoded by the network packet, the disclosed system can match header fields across multiple packet headers. In contrast, many existing solutions are limited to matching a single packet header at a time.