: but really, I wasn't planning on having anyone (solr or otherwise) solving my : needs. I just find it odd that I need to discern the number of returned : results.
true, but you also have to discern the number of fields returned for each doc, and the number of values in each of those fields, and the number of values for each facet.field, etc... there are lots of "lists" of things that can be included in a Solr response that could be prefaced by a count indicating how many there are -- just like any string could be prefaced by a count of how many bytes it contains so you kow how far to read without having to scan. this kind of meta-data makes sense for binary formats, but for things like the XML, Ruby, and JSON responses seems like overkill. -Hoss
