9. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having encoded thereon: token processor logic which, when executed by one or more processors, is operable to receive data comprising a structured electronic document in serialized format and to identify one or more entities in the data; name recognition engine logic when executed by the one or more processors is operable to recognize one or more names of elements of the structured electronic document and to recognize one or more names of attributes of the elements; finite state automaton logic comprising states and transitions representing structural relationships among elements and attributes of one or more structured path expressions and state look-ahead logic when executed by the one or more processors is operable to determine one or more active states of the automaton and one or more next states of an automaton; processing logic which, when executed by the one or more processors, is operable to cause: receiving at a token processor one or more messages comprising the structured electronic document in serialized format; identifying, at a token processor, one or more entities in the one or more messages; determining, at a name recognition engine, whether at least one entity of the one or more entities corresponds to at least one of the one or more next states of the automaton; sending to the automaton, from the name recognition engine, the at least one entity when the at least one entity corresponds to at least one of the one or more next states of the automaton; the automaton performing, based on the at least one entity, one or more state transitions resulting in reaching a final state of the automaton; outputting the final state of the automaton; wherein the name recognition engine logic, when executed by the one or more processors, is further operable to cause generating a data table and a tree; wherein the tree comprises a root node corresponding to a character position in names of elements or attributes in the structured electronic document; wherein the processing logic, when executed by the one or more processors, is further operable to cause walking the tree to seek a match for a name of a specified entity among the one or more entities by: selecting a letter in a position specified by a label of the root node and comparing the selected letter to other letters that label links to a child node; determining that a specified entity's name is of no interest if the specified entity's name matches none of the other letters; traversing a link labeled by the letter when there is a match; comparing all remaining letters and determining a match upon reaching a leaf node.
13. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 9 wherein the transitions of the automaton correspond to “child of” and “descendent of” structural operators in the structured electronic document.