In some of his recent work Lukas Smith has been testing the waters of what Solr (the fast, open source search platform) has to offer. In his work with it he needed a way to convert the queries that come in from users into something Solr can understand. In this new post he explains how and shares the code for his solution (symfony-based).

In this blog post I want to talk about a prototype class I threw together (Look ma', I'm using git!) by working ezcSearch to help me in parsing and transforming end user queries into complex Solr queries.

He includes a few examples of Solr queries and what sort of data they'd return as well as the source for the library he's created to extend the sfSolrPlugin translate something coming in from a form into a simple Solr-formatted query.