Best way to gather span/token positions from query?

[Sean O'Connor]

Hello,
   I'm trying to find a decent approach for getting token positions out 
of (or is that into?) solr query results. Is the best approach to extend 
a QueryComponent and/or HighlightComponent? I'm new to solr, and still 
on fairly shaky ground soany pointers or suggestions are quite welcome.

   As a little BACKGROUND:
   I am trying to migrate a custom  lucene-only content anaylsys 
project to solr. The 'old' system programmatically runs a few thousand 
predefined queries against a corpus, and then analyzes the results. The 
lucene score is good, but the actual position of the hits is also quite 
important.

   My previous system did a simple query parsing to create SpanQuerys, 
and then used a modified dumpSpans() to get the token position from the 
spans. Now I am trying to find how to use solr's goodness (and 
MemoryIndex approach?) to get the span positions in a more logical 
manner. I think the answer is in the highlighter, but I'm getting a 
little twisted around, and could use a pointer.

   I am using a recent Solr nightly snapshot, grails, Aduna Aperture, 
and Intellij (if any of that matters)
Thanks,

Sean