A system and method for facilitating packet transformation of
multi-protocol, multi-flow, streaming data. Packet portions subject to
change are temporarily stored, and acted upon through processing of
protocol-dependent instructions, resulting in a protocol-dependent
modification of the temporarily stored packet information. Validity tags
are associated with different segments of the temporarily-stored packet,
where the state of each tag determines whether its corresponding packet
segment will form part of the resulting modified packet. Only those
packet segments identified as being part of the resulting modified packet
are reassembled prior to dispatch of the packet.