5. The method of claim 1 wherein the received regular expression is associated with a target algorithm for evaluating the regular expression, and the optimization is performed at least partially based upon knowledge of the target algorithm.
5. The method of claim 1 wherein the received regular expression is associated with a target algorithm for evaluating the regular expression, and the optimization is performed at least partially based upon knowledge of the target algorithm. 6. The method of claim 5 wherein the target algorithm that is associated with the regular expression is selected from the group consisting of: deterministic finite state machine algorithms; non-deterministic finite state machine algorithms, and parallel string matching algorithms.