Find the non-intersecting values of two arrays

Question

If I have two numpy arrays and want to find the the non-intersecting values, how do I do it?

Here's a short example of what I can't figure out.

a = ['Brian', 'Steve', 'Andrew', 'Craig']
b = ['Andrew','Steve']

I want to find the non-intersecting values. In this case I want my output to be:

['Brian','Craig']

The opposite of what I want is done with this:

c=np.intersect1d(a,b)

which returns

['Andrew' 'Steve']

Answer 1

You can use setxor1d. According to the documentation:

Find the set exclusive-or of two arrays.
Return the sorted, unique values that are in only one (not both) of the input arrays.

Usage is as follows:

import numpy

a = ['Brian', 'Steve', 'Andrew', 'Craig']
b = ['Andrew','Steve']

c = numpy.setxor1d(a, b)

Executing this will result in c having a value of array(['Brian', 'Craig']).