: In my thinking (and for this situation), it would be much better to
: just ignore the malformed field and keep the doc - is there any way to
: configure this or enable this behavior instead?
4.0-ALPHA added some new UpdateProcessorFactories that can be configured
in your solrconfig.xml when you know you have field values you may want
"mutate".
Of particular interest to you may be...
TrimFieldUpdateProcessorFactory
RemoveBlankFieldUpdateProcessorFactory
https://lucene.apache.org/solr/api-4_0_0-BETA/org/apache/solr/update/processor/FieldMutatingUpdateProcessorFactory.html
RegexReplaceProcessorFactory might also be useful to you if you have more
crufty data then just the blank/whitespace values you mentioned in your
email...
https://lucene.apache.org/solr/api-4_0_0-BETA/org/apache/solr/update/processor/RegexReplaceProcessorFactory.html
-Hoss
