GREP - negative look behind

Question

I should be able to do this, but I am not.
I want to change the formatting of negative numbers in tables from - to ().
Fine I can do that (thanks to help from this Forum).
First I do a Grep find/replace "-(?=.+)" to "("
Then "\A\(.+\Z" to "$0)"
Happy
But now I have negative numbers in cells of different width.
The numbers must be aligned to the last number, leaving the ")" stick out to the right.
I can do that by applying a paragraph style which depend of the width of the cell, and letting it left-align to ")"
A laboriously work.
Instead I am trying to apply a right indent to all positive number cells not having "()". I can do that manually, but thats no go.
I thought I could apply the right indent paragraph style like this:
(?<!$0)\)
or
(?<!$0\s)\)
or perhaps
(?<!$0!\s)\)
But no, they all find the actual negative numbers having "()".
Can you help me how to solve it?
Best regards
Nina Storm

Answer 1

The one which worked for med was:
"\A[^)]+\Z"
Hey, that's different than what I had in mind -- but if it works: great!
Allow me to explain yours: the expression "every single character except a close paren", repeated once or more. I was thinking along these lines:
\A[^(].*\Z
-- everything except an opening paren (because I think you typed it wrong in this post ), which 'eats up' the very first character, followed by zero or more 'any characters'.
These are the basic 'repeat' codes:
x?   One 'x' or none, as in "Figures?" -- this will match both "Figure" and "Figures"
x*   Zero 'x'es or more -- this will match the start of "hello" (because there are zero exes!) and "xxxxxxhello"
x+  One 'x' or more -- this will not match the start of "hello" (because there are zero exes) but will match the start of "xxxxxxhello"
x{2,5}  Not used very often, but it can be handy: a minimum of 2 and maximum of 5 exes. Won't match 'x' but will match 'xxxx' and the first five exes in 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx'.
In addition, all of these 'repeats' will match as many characters as possible; 'x+' will match the entire string 'xxxxxxxxx'. If you don't want that, put another question mark right after the code to match as little as possible: 'x+?' will match only the first 'x' in 'xxxxxxx'. This is important if you are looking for delimiters of any kind, such as a set of open and close parentheses, like this:
\(.+\)
This will match everything from the very first opening to the very last closing parentheses in an entire paragraph -- repeating the 'any' character code. Now you wouldn't want that if, for example, you want to replace them with square brackets, so in this particular case you would use
\(.+?\)
Oh but I'm digressing.