: So to be clear, you'd be in favor of adding some type of .toXml() to the : explain classes, vs. trying to parse the string output.
...no i mean a helper method like... public static NamedList convert(Explanation exp) { ... } ...that walks the Explanation structure and converts it to a NmaedList structure. that way it would convey the structure with any response writer (xml, json, etc...) we can't add solr specific methods directly to the Explanation classes (they're in Lucene core and already provide a programatic way to inspect the explanations) -Hoss