1. A computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having a computer readable program stored therein, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a data processing system, causes the data processing system to: receive an input line of data, wherein the input line of data is a portion of a variable length encoded data stream comprising a number of bytes of data of the variable length encoded data stream received during a single processor cycle; determine an amount of bit spill over of the input line of data onto a next input line of data, wherein the amount of bit spill over is an amount of bits of a symbol, partially present in the input line of data, that is present in the next input line of data; align the next input line of data to begin at an encoded symbol boundary based on the determined amount of bit spill over; tokenize the aligned next input line of data to generate a set of tokens, wherein each token corresponds to a symbol in the aligned next input line of data; and generate an output word of data based on the set of tokens, wherein the output word of data corresponds to a word of data in the original set of data.