ruby on rails - solr sanitizing query

Question

I am using solr with ruby on rails. It's all working well, I just need to know if there's any existing code to sanitize user input, like a query starting with ? or *

Answer 1

I don't know any code that does this, but theoretically it could be done by looking at the parsing code in Lucene and searching for throw new ParseException (only 16 matches!).

In practice, I think you're better off just catching any solr exceptions in your code and showing an "invalid query" message or something like that.

EDIT: Here are a couple of "sanitizers":

• http://pivotallabs.com/users/zach/blog/articles/937-sanitizing-solr-requests
• http://github.com/jvoorhis/lucene_query
• http://e-mats.org/2010/01/escaping-characters-in-a-solr-query-solr-url/