Find Values Contained in First Vector but not Another in R (2 Examples)
In this R programming post you’ll learn how to find out which values are contained in one vector, but not in a second vector.
The article will consist of two examples for the identification of unique values. More precisely, the tutorial consists of these content blocks:
It’s time to dive into the examples.
Example Data
The following data is used as basement for this R programming language tutorial:
vec1 <- 1:10 # Create & print example vectors vec1 # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 vec2 <- 6:15 vec2 # 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 |
vec1 <- 1:10 # Create & print example vectors vec1 # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 vec2 <- 6:15 vec2 # 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
The previous output of the RStudio console shows that our exemplifying data consists of two numeric vectors (or arrays) with a different range of values.
Example 1: Find Unique Elements of the First Vector Using setdiff Function
Example 1 explains how to check which values are contained in one vector, but not in another vector using the setdiff function.
setdiff(vec1, vec2) # Apply setdiff function # 1 2 3 4 5 |
setdiff(vec1, vec2) # Apply setdiff function # 1 2 3 4 5
The RStudio console returns the values ranging from 1 to 5, i.e. those values are only contained in vec1, but not in vec2.
Example 2: Find Unique Elements of the First Vector Using %in%-Operator
The R programming language provides additional ways how to find values only contained in vector No. 1. In this Example, I’ll show how to find such elements using the %in%-operator. Have a look at the following R code:
vec1[! vec1 %in% vec2] # Apply %in%-operator # 1 2 3 4 5 |
vec1[! vec1 %in% vec2] # Apply %in%-operator # 1 2 3 4 5
As you can see, the output is exactly the same as in Example 1. Looks good!
Video & Further Resources
Have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. I’m explaining the contents of this article in the video:
The YouTube video will be added soon.
In addition, I can recommend to read the other tutorials on this homepage:
- unique Function in R
- Find Unique Combinations of All Elements from Two Vectors in R
- Sort Vector Based on Values of Another
- The R Programming Language
In summary: In this R tutorial you learned how to print those elements that are only contained in the first vector. In case you have additional questions, please let me know in the comments section.
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