CF 2023 Bug or Solr Configuration Problem

Glad to see you're making progress. I would suggest you now focus on debugging the input you're receiving. For now, take the search out of the equation, as you know that works if the criteria is correct. The question now is why it's not correct when input as a variable.

So I'll assume you've long ago output to the screen what was the input, or perhaps you relied on the cf debugging output at the bottom of the screen. Is that right? And the displayed form field values always "looked fine"? Yet somehow it failed to work as expected when passed as the search criteria?

(You certainly don't want "12 quotes". I'm assuming you've solved that now. Indeed there should be NO quotes around that input, as you'll be passing those results in as a quoted attribute of cfsearch...and any embedded double quotes will be a problem. But you can see those and seem now to have solved them.) 

Next, you may be suffering from unreadable characters being in that input...well, I mean you can't see them on screen in a cfoutput, because the browser may be rendering the display of that output (in any debugging output) so as not to SHOW those characters. So one option to do a view>source in your browser, to see what the text looks like. 

Another solution is to use code like this:

<cfoutput>#htmleditformat(form.keywords)#</cfoutput>

That very old function, or its sibling htmlcodeformat, will render any characters in a way that might show the problem.

And I'd recommend you view this form.keywords value both as it would be after the form submission--just before you would do the cfsearch.

But then also consider it for looking at any values you pre-fill in the form field. You show you're putting the form fields back into the input form, and perhaps you're doing some processing once you receive them. But then you may be putting THE ORIGINAL form fields back into their next display of the form. (BTW, such problems can be exacerbated when the "form input" actually comes from some database where perhaps you save and reuse prior search terms.) 

So another technique (to see actual text vs what the browser would "render") is to put the value in an html textarea form field, which also shows the actual text (or it could be the value of an input field, but the input populated from a db or by your form processing may be more than one line.)  BTW, I just mean use the textarea for debugging, not for normal user input. 

These techniques can be valuable to resolving such subtle bugs.

But if you still struggle, I'd recommend also you create a simple 5-10 line sample of a form and display of its output, and what values you're putting in. With that we might more easily resolve things. Clearly, to this point your words have had us focusing on cfsearch, but now this may be down to just this challenge of form processing.