diff --git a/modules/analysis/common/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/charfilter/HTMLStripCharFilter.java b/modules/analysis/common/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/charfilter/HTMLStripCharFilter.java
index ff3f20fb8a1..188d4e03fb5 100644
--- a/modules/analysis/common/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/charfilter/HTMLStripCharFilter.java
+++ b/modules/analysis/common/src/java/org/apache/lucene/analysis/charfilter/HTMLStripCharFilter.java
@@ -124,8 +124,8 @@ public class HTMLStripCharFilter extends BaseCharFilter {
 
   private boolean isHex(int ch) {
     return (ch>='0' && ch<='9') ||
-           (ch>='A' && ch<='Z') ||
-           (ch>='a' && ch<='z');
+           (ch>='A' && ch<='F') ||
+           (ch>='a' && ch<='f');
   }
 
   private boolean isAlpha(int ch) {
diff --git a/solr/CHANGES.txt b/solr/CHANGES.txt
index b54c486c844..497b46eb946 100644
--- a/solr/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/solr/CHANGES.txt
@@ -402,6 +402,9 @@ Bug Fixes
 ----------------------
 * SOLR-2912: Fixed File descriptor leak in ShowFileRequestHandler (Michael Ryan, shalin)
 
+* SOLR-2819: Improved speed of parsing hex entities in HTMLStripCharFilter
+  (Bernhard Berger, hossman)
+
 ==================  3.5.0  ==================
 
 New Features