Hello all, not sure if this is a noob question but here it goes: How can I get the difference between two List/ArrayList regardless of the order of the sentence? I mean, for example these two lists

val first = listOf(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
 val second = listOf(1, 2, 3)

If I use

first.minus(second)

I’ll get

[4, 5]

but If I use

second.minus(first)

I’ll get

[]

You can convert to sets and get the symmetric difference, though there's no convenient standard library function, interestingly

Found this one: https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Kotlin

They have added recently the

intersect

function to the stdlib, I think they should add the opposite too

@Javier, No

intersect

was not added recently, it's been there quite a long time

Maybe union was? Don't remember then. I am going to like that issue, I had the difference as extension function since 2019.

That's really cool, thanks for the update

@Javier How do you use your extension function in your code? What tasks do you solve with it?

For example in an android app, we had multiple lists of quizzes, generally a pair of lists, and was a requirement to get the difference of quizzes to show them to the user.