The default "human readable" formatting of solr's debug-mode explain feature is completely useless. You can get some structured xml output by passing debug.explain.structured=true.
However the xml it generates isn't really usable either and I need to be able to use this debugging information elsewhere in my code.
Before I re-invent the wheel, I have two questions:
1) Does anyone know of an existing PHP class (or function) that will parse this xml and turn it into a useful object? (googling didn't turn up anything obvious)
2) For those familiar with SOLR's debug mode, is there a better way to approach this than parsing the debug.explain.structured xml?
(I'm Using SOLR 3.6)
I am doing this using the solr-php-client. I do use a regular expression to parse out a specific value, but it's easy to access the debug explanation.
As an example, here is how I extract the coord value from the debug explanation:
$client = new Apache_Solr_Service($hostname, $port, $url);
$response = $client->search($q, $offset, $limit, $parameters);
$debug = reset($response['debug']['explain']); // get the first explanation
if (preg_match('#([\d\.]+) = coord\((\d+)/(\d+)\)#m', $debug, $matches)) {
$coord = floatval($matches[1]);
$overlap = intval($matches[2]); // the number of matching keywords
$max_overlap = intval($matches[3]); // the total number of keywords
}
i am having the same problem and stared a github project for parsing the solr explain into an object structure. With this library it is possible to calculate the impact of a certain field from the explain output: