Getting the character offset from highlighted fragments

[Simon Wistow]

Having poked around little it doesn't look like there's an query param 
to turn this on but it'd be really useful if highlighted fragments could 
have a character offset return somehow - maybe something like

<lst name="highlighting">
  <lst name="27314523">
    <arr name="content">
      <str offset="600">
          Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <em>consectetur</em> adipisicing 
          </str>
    </arr>
  </lst>
</lst>

or even

<lst name="highlighting">
  <lst name="27314523">
    <arr name="content">
      <str>
          Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <em>consectetur</em> adipisicing 
          </str>
    </arr>
    <arr name="offsets">
      <int>
          600
          </int>
    </arr>
  </lst>
</lst>



It looks like org.apache.lucene.search.highlight.TextFragment has the 
right information to do this (i.e textStartPos) but before I start 
writing patches ...

 - I'm a duplicating exisiting work
 - Am I missing some reason why this is a dumb idea
 - Is this desirable (or, to be more succinct, if I write a patch, is it 
   likely to be accepted?)


Thanks,

Simon