Certain tasks related to processing layer 7 (L7) data streams, such as HTTP data streams, can be performed by an L7 assist circuit instead of by general-purpose CPUs. The L7 assist circuit can normalize URLs, Huffman decode, Huffman encode, and generate hashes of normalized URLs. A L7 data stream, which is reassembled from received network packets, includes an L7 header. L7 assist produces an augmented L7 header that is added to the L7 data stream. The CPUs can use the augmented L7 header, thereby speeding up processing. On the outbound path, L7 assist can remove the augmented L7 header and perform Huffman encoding such that the CPUs can perform other tasks.