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Find the Difference of Two Arrays

Difficulty: Easy

Problem Description

Given two 0-indexed integer arrays nums1 and nums2, return a list answer of size 2 where:

  • answer[0] is a list of all distinct integers in nums1 which are not present in nums2.
  • answer[1] is a list of all distinct integers in nums2 which are not present in nums1.

Note that the integers in the lists may be returned in any order.

Key Insights

  • We need to find distinct elements in both arrays.
  • A set data structure is useful for efficiently checking membership and storing unique elements.
  • We can iterate through both arrays and compare their elements.

Space and Time Complexity

Time Complexity: O(n + m), where n is the length of nums1 and m is the length of nums2, as we traverse both arrays once.

Space Complexity: O(n + m) for storing the distinct elements in sets.

Solution

To solve this problem, we can use two sets to collect the distinct elements from both arrays. We will:

  1. Convert both arrays into sets to eliminate duplicates.
  2. Use set difference operations to find elements that are in one set but not in the other.
  3. Return the results as a list of two lists.

Code Solutions

def findDifference(nums1, nums2):
    # Convert both lists to sets to get distinct elements
    set1 = set(nums1)
    set2 = set(nums2)
    
    # Find elements in set1 not in set2 and vice versa
    diff1 = list(set1 - set2)
    diff2 = list(set2 - set1)
    
    return [diff1, diff2]
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