Difference of cell arrays containing strings

Hello everybody,

I try to calculate the difference of two cell arrays containing strings. I want to identify the unique strings which are only present in one of the cell arrays. Here is an example:

Cell1 = {'Joe', 'Ralph', 'Sandra'};
Cell2 = {'Joe', 'Sandra'};

I now want to calculate Cell3 containing the "difference" of these two arrays, that means Cell3 should be equal to {'Ralph'}. For simplicity it could be assumed that all components of Cell2 are also components of Cell1. I want to identify the extra components in Cell1.

Any ideas? Thank you very much!

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Use setdiff.

From the documentation: C = setdiff(A,B) returns the data in A that is not in B.

[Ralf]

That was simple! I couldn't find this on my own.

Thank you very much!

[Stephen23]

Glad to help.

A tip for finding functions: learn to navigate the help contents (on the left-hand side of the page), you can discover lots of useful functions and advice here, and it is grouped intro useful concepts and categories. Ten minutes exploring this is time well spent.