1. A method comprising: receiving, by a first stage of a context-aware pattern matching and parsing (CPMP) hardware accelerator of a network device, a packet stream; performing, by the first stage, a pre-matching process, including string matching and overflow pattern matching, on packets within the packet stream to identify a candidate packet within the packet stream that matches one or more strings or over-flow patterns associated with a set of Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) or Application Delivery Controller (ADC) rules; identifying, by the first stage, a candidate rule from the set of IPS or ADC rules based on a correlation of results of the pre-matching process; tokenizing, by the first stage, packet data of the candidate packet to produce matching tokens and corresponding locations of the matching token within the candidate packet; performing, by a second stage of the CPMP hardware accelerator including a plurality of CPMP processors, a full-match process on the candidate packet to determine whether the candidate packet satisfies the candidate rule by fetching and executing special purpose CPMP instructions to perform one or more of (i) context-aware pattern matching on one or more packet field values of the candidate packet, (ii) context-aware string matching on packet data of the candidate packet and (iii) regular expression matching on the packet data based on a plurality of predefined conditions associated with the candidate rule, corresponding contextual information provided by the candidate rule, the matching tokens and the corresponding locations; and providing, by the second stage, results of the full-match process to a general purpose processor of the network device.
10. The method of claim 1 , wherein the special purpose CPMP instructions comprise instructions for sequentially or in parallel performing one or more of exact character matching, negative character matching, wild card matching, string matching, field matching and range matching.