1. A method of providing stateful flow of a byte stream having portions across a plurality of related network packets in a packet parsing processor, the method comprising: receiving a network packet having a portion of the byte stream; determining that the network packet is from the plurality of related network packets by retrieving a parsing context comprising a current parsing state of the byte stream; wherein retrieving the parsing context comprises accessing header information to retrieve the parsing context, and upon determining that the header information does not contain the parsing context, retrieving the parsing context from a storage element of the packet parsing processor based on the header information; and performing instruction-driven packet parsing on the portion responsive to the current parsing state.