MySolr

Many of you may have seen this exception when trying out Solr’s range search query based on Solr’s documentation.

HTTP Status 400 - org.apache.lucene.queryParser.ParseException:
Cannot parse 'rank:[1 to 10]': Encountered "10" at line 1, column 11.
Was expecting: "]" ...

This exception is saying that Lucene’s query parser does not recognize a third value “10″ in the range filter query.  The parser only expects two values.  It’s kind of confusing because Solr’s documentation gives an example of “field:[1 to 100]“.  Interestingly, the documentation is consistent between Solr and Lucene’s documentation regarding the range search query format:

http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrQuerySyntax

http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_4_0/queryparsersyntax.html#Range Searches

As you can see, they both describe range search query’s syntax as <field>:[<from> to <to>].  However, this syntax is incorrect (at least for Solr 1.3).  The correct syntax should be <field>:[<from> <to>].  Notice that the keyword “to” between from and to is not needed.  For example:

• Return results with value in field “rank” between 1 and 100
  • fq=rank:[1 100] 
• Return results with value in field “rank” less than or equal to 10
  • fq=rank:[* 10]
• Return results with value in field “rank” greater than or equal to 10
  • fq=rank:[10 *]

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