MATLAB: Difference of cell arrays containing strings

Question

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

Use setdiff.

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