Lets say I have a section of a list that looks like this:
aaa[[1]]
# [1] "A5-5,73" "B3-4,73" "E3-8,73" "A1-8,73" "C1-7,73" "A1-2,73" "C3-2,73" "C1-1,73"
Lets say I have another list with a section that looks like this:
bbb[[1]]
# [1] "B3-4,73" "C3-2,73" "A5-5,73" "A1-8,73" "A1-2,73" "A1-5,73" "B1-1,73" "C1-4,73"
Consider that I now run
which(aaa[[1]]!= bbb[[1]])
which returns
# [1] 1 2 3 5 6 7 8
This is technically true, because the index [4] is the same in both aaa and bbb
What I would like to have returned is:
# [1] "C1-7,73" "A1-2,73" "C1-1,73"
because these are the values of aaa that are not in bbb regardless of position. I would also be open to a solution that would just provide an index number, such as:
# [1] 5 6 8
Here is a reproducible example:
aaa <- vector("list")
aaa[[1]] <- c("A5-5,73", "B3-4,73", "E3-8,73", "A1-8,73",
"C1-7,73", "A1-2,73", "C3-2,73", "C1-1,73")
bbb <- vector("list")
bbb[[1]] <- c("B3-4,73", "C3-2,73", "A5-5,73", "A1-8,73",
"A1-2,73", "A1-5,73", "B1-1,73", "C1-4,73")
If you want to compare every element of the list aaa with the corresponding element bbb simply do.
mapply(FUN = setdiff, x = aaa, y = bbb)
While writing this I saw setdiff was mentioned already in the comments by @RichardScriven.