R removing items in a sublist from a list

Question

I have a list:

L <- c("a","b","c","d","e")

I also have a subset of this list:

L1 <- c("b","d","e")

I am trying to create a new list that does not contain the subset list.

I have tried:

L[L!%in%L1]
L[L%in%!L1]
L[L%in%-L1]

but this does not work. I would be grateful for your help.

Answer 1

It should be

L[!(L %in% L1)]

Because of operator precedence (?Syntax), you can also do

L[!L %in% L1]

Finally, you also have:

setdiff(L, L1)

Answer 2

You could also play with vecsets:vsetdiff (disclaimer: I wrote this scary package). Unlike proper set theory as implemented in setdiff, vsetdiff will return all elements of a vector which do not appear in the second argument, thus allowing for multiple instances of a given value.

vsetdiff(L,L1)
[1] "a" "c"
vsetdiff(L1,L)
character(0)