Handling Lucene query parser errors

Question

My application takes a user inputted string and tries to parse it with the Lucene query parser. I noticed however that there are several formats of strings that provoke an error in this query parser.
e.g.:

• ~anystring
• anystring +

First I tried molding my user inputted string so that it could not contain these cases, but as I see it, there could be more cases I do not foresee now.

How do you handle Query parser exceptions? How do you prevent them?

Answer 1

We catch the remaining parse exceptions and display an error message ("Your search did not match any documents. Suggestion: Try different keywords.").

See also How to make the Lucene QueryParser more forgiving?