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

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

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

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.