: It still seems to get confused by & characters and turning them into %26 : does not work from the solr-ruby connection. ..but it works for most of the : DOI's that I have tried so still a big improvement - thanks.
my suggestion would be to start by testing your queries in a browser so you can rule out the possibility that the ruby client you are using isn't botching the URL escaping. you can use echoParams=all to veryify what Solr is getting. Also note that if you just want to do simple lookups the "FieldQParser" may be of use to you -- it does a straight lookup of it's input on a specified field without having any special characters (but it still has to be properly URL escaped by something in order for solr to get it)... http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrPlugins?highlight=QParserPlugin http://lucene.apache.org/solr/api/org/apache/solr/search/FieldQParserPlugin.html -Hoss
