Question

What’s the fastest/best way to compare two arrays and return the difference? Much like array_diff in PHP. Is there an easy function or am I going to have to create one via each()? or a foreach loop?

Answer 1

Working demo http://jsfiddle.net/u9xES/

Good link (Jquery Documentation): http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page {you can search or read APIs here}

Hope this will help you if you are looking to do it in JQuery.

The alert in the end prompts the array of uncommon element Array i.e. difference between 2 array.

Please lemme know if I missed anything, cheers!

Code

var array1 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6];
var array2 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9];
var difference = [];

jQuery.grep(array2, function(el) {
        if (jQuery.inArray(el, array1) == -1) difference.push(el);
});

alert(" the difference is " + difference);​ // Changed variable name