In Java, you can use the Collection interface's removeAll method.
// Create a couple ArrayList objects and populate them
// with some delicious fruits.
Collection firstList = new ArrayList() {{
add("apple");
add("orange");
}};
Collection secondList = new ArrayList() {{
add("apple");
add("orange");
add("banana");
add("strawberry");
}};
// Show the "before" lists
System.out.println("First List: " + firstList);
System.out.println("Second List: " + secondList);
// Remove all elements in firstList from secondList
secondList.removeAll(firstList);
// Show the "after" list
System.out.println("Result: " + secondList);
The above code will produce the following output:
First List: [apple, orange]
Second List: [apple, orange, banana, strawberry]
Result: [banana, strawberry]
Answer from William Brendel on Stack OverflowIn Java, you can use the Collection interface's removeAll method.
// Create a couple ArrayList objects and populate them
// with some delicious fruits.
Collection firstList = new ArrayList() {{
add("apple");
add("orange");
}};
Collection secondList = new ArrayList() {{
add("apple");
add("orange");
add("banana");
add("strawberry");
}};
// Show the "before" lists
System.out.println("First List: " + firstList);
System.out.println("Second List: " + secondList);
// Remove all elements in firstList from secondList
secondList.removeAll(firstList);
// Show the "after" list
System.out.println("Result: " + secondList);
The above code will produce the following output:
First List: [apple, orange]
Second List: [apple, orange, banana, strawberry]
Result: [banana, strawberry]
You already have the right answer. And if you want to make more complicated and interesting operations between Lists (collections) use apache commons collections (CollectionUtils) It allows you to make conjuction/disjunction, find intersection, check if one collection is a subset of another and other nice things.
Convert Lists to Collection and use removeAll
Collection<String> listOne = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("a","b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g"));
Collection<String> listTwo = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("a","b", "d", "e", "f", "gg", "h"));
List<String> sourceList = new ArrayList<String>(listOne);
List<String> destinationList = new ArrayList<String>(listTwo);
sourceList.removeAll( listTwo );
destinationList.removeAll( listOne );
System.out.println( sourceList );
System.out.println( destinationList );
Output:
[c, g]
[gg, h]
[EDIT]
other way (more clear)
Collection<String> list = new ArrayList(Arrays.asList("a","b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g"));
List<String> sourceList = new ArrayList<String>(list);
List<String> destinationList = new ArrayList<String>(list);
list.add("boo");
list.remove("b");
sourceList.removeAll( list );
list.removeAll( destinationList );
System.out.println( sourceList );
System.out.println( list );
Output:
[b]
[boo]
This should check if two lists are equal, it does some basic checks first (i.e. nulls and lengths), then sorts and uses the collections.equals method to check if they are equal.
public boolean equalLists(List<String> a, List<String> b){
// Check for sizes and nulls
if (a == null && b == null) return true;
if ((a == null && b!= null) || (a != null && b== null) || (a.size() != b.size()))
{
return false;
}
// Sort and compare the two lists
Collections.sort(a);
Collections.sort(b);
return a.equals(b);
}
Implement equals and hashCode in your custom object and you can use the same approach as you did with Strings.
Well, the removeAll method is a generic library method which doesn't know anything about your model class. So if you think about it for a second, how is it going to know which ones are "the same"?
The short answer is that you need to override the equals() method in your Model class, as this is what the checks are based on. The implementation should return true for any pair of model instances that you wish to be considered the same - the default inherited behaviour returns true only if they're the same object in memory. (And as always, when you override equals() you must override hashCode() too).