next states in the corresponding state spaces 870 730 in practical implementations the number of entries is typically much greater than with the state diagram used to illustrate those various embodiments of the present invention presented herein fig1 illustrates an example of a data structure according to the aforementioned second preferred embodiment that can be used for searching the state register and the next state fields in the transition rule entries within the compressed tables are not used in this search and the two left most bits within the test vectors that correspond to the state register equal xxb don 39 t care the data structure implements a prefix search on a 12 bit vector consisting of a first 1000 second 1010 and third 1020 4 bit input value as shown in fig1 the prefixes and corresponding search results are the data structure for this example consists of three compressed tables that are each u201c indexed u201d by one of the input values the compressed table that is indexed by the first input value is used to determine whether the above prefixes might match the input based on the first 4 bits of those prefixes which are 0001b prefix 1 0101b prefix 2 and 1010b prefix 3 the test vectors corresponding to those prefixes are xx 0001b prefix 1 the bit positions related to the state register 1030 contain xxb as mentioned above in this example the number of entries per entry block is chosen to be equal to n 2 for this value of n and the above test vectors the compressed index computed according to the bart algorithm consists of one bit 1070 and the entries related to prefix 1 and prefix 2 are mapped on a compressed index value of 0b and the entry.