1. A method of matching a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to a resource or rule, comprising: progressively hashing a clause of the URL character by character to generate a hash code for the clause; determining if a delimiting character is encountered; using the hash code associated with the clause to traverse a tree data structure representing clauses of URLs and corresponding resources or rules, wherein each node of the tree data structure has an associated multidimensional hash table; and matching the URL to resources or rules based on the traversing of the tree data structure.