Thanks for the reply John, I'll try to expose my "use case" with the hope this feature will be available in the future...
I'm developing a system that detects TCP streams with a pattern matching, here is the pseudo code (in a simplified form) of the function I'd link to extend:
protocol_stream decodeStream(tcp_stream)
{
foreach(registered protocol in the system)
{
required_size_to_match = calc_min_regex_len(current_protocol.regex);
if(tcp_stream.buffer_size <= required_size_to_match)
check if tcp_stream.buffer matches
else
try to read from tcp_stream if data is available until