Get common characters from strings

Question

I'm looking for the way of comparing two strings and being able to get back, as separate strings:

• All the common characters,
• The uncommon characters, (all characters but without the common ones)
• Characters that are unique to one string.

Example:

A = "123 ABC"
B = "135 AZ"

thingamajigger(A, B)  # would give all these:

intersect = "13 A"  # (includes space)
exclusion = "2BCZ5"
a_minus_b = "2BC"
b_minus_a = "5Z"

a_minus_b is quite simple... but if there's one of those fancy one-liner ways to pull it off, then I'm open.

for i in B:
    A = A.replace(i, "")

It's a bit like boolean operations on strings.

Answer 1

Use set:

s = set("123 ABC")
t = set("135 AZ")
intersect = s & t # or s.intersection(t)
exclusion = s ^ t # or s.symmetric_difference(t)
a_minus_b = s - t # or s.difference(t)
b_minus_a = t - s # or t.difference(s)