[RESOLVED] Comparing two arrays and extract the differences

[danrah]

I have two one-dimensional arrays starting from index 0. The first array stores the complete list of students' names and has (for example) 500 elements and the second array consists of a part of the larger array. How can i extract the elements that exist in the first array and not in the second array.
Thanks in advance,

[bpat1434]

[man]array_diff/man

[danrah]

Thanks.But it doesn't work and that function only returns the contents of the first array. Is that because my arrays are filled with unicode characters?

[bpat1434]

The function will return the difference of one array. You can do:

$array1 = array();
$array2 = array();

$diff1 = array_diff($array1, $array2);
$diff2 = array_diff($array2, $array1);

$diff = array_merge($diff1, $diff2);
$diff = array_unique($diff);
print_r($diff);

Which would work the diff both ways, then merge them together and then remove the duplicates.

How can i extract the elements that exist in the first array and not in the second array.

This question is exactly what the [man]array_diff/man function does. Given two arrays, it will return those that are in the first array, that aren't in the second (or any other arrays passed). So it would seem it does exactly what you want... get the names from $array1 that aren't present in the second array.

[danrah]

Thanks, The problem was stem from an additional whitespace that was fixed after using trim().