Here's a patch that stops treating +, -, ! as operators if they are followed by whitespace.
Everyone seemed to previously agree about + and -, but I also threw in ! for consistency since it was another single char (largely unknown synonym for NOT) unary operator. Thoughts?

+1 !!!

but i know lots of people that are too stupid to understand that unary operator must be directly in front of term

This should be possible to backport to 3.x. I have a customer with this exact problem on 3.5...

+1 to backport to 3x.

Re-opening for backport

Backport to 3.6 branch. All tests pass. Committing soon.

Checked in for 3.6.1

Should StandardQueryParser work like QueryParser?
In current branches and trunk TestQPHelper still contains the line
assertQueryEquals("a OR ! b", null, "a -b");
(and also "a - b" is parsed as "a -b)

Bulk close for 3.6.1

This is great!

There seems to be an inconsistency with the exclamation mark ! (NOT operator)

"foo-" acceptable
"foo+" acceptable
"foo!" parse exception

although if I add whitespace after:

"foo! " acceptable

Is this expected operation? Am I missing something