Write a Java Program to Calculate the difference between two sets

Calculating the difference between two sets is a common operation in programming, and it can be useful in a variety of contexts.

In this tutorial, we will discuss how to write a Java program to calculate the difference between two sets.


In Java, we can use the built-in HashSet class to represent sets.

HashSet is a collection that contains no duplicate elements, and it does not maintain any order of the elements.

To calculate the difference between two sets, we can simply create two HashSet objects and use the removeAll() method to remove all the elements in the second set from the first set.

Here is the Java code to calculate the difference between two sets:

import java.util.HashSet;

public class SetDifference {

   public static void main(String[] args) {

      // Create two sets
      HashSet<Integer> set1 = new HashSet<>();
      HashSet<Integer> set2 = new HashSet<>();

      // Add elements to the first set
      set1.add(1);
      set1.add(2);
      set1.add(3);
      set1.add(4);
      set1.add(5);

      // Add elements to the second set
      set2.add(3);
      set2.add(4);
      set2.add(5);
      set2.add(6);
      set2.add(7);

      // Calculate the difference between the two sets
      set1.removeAll(set2);

      // Print the result
      System.out.println("Difference between set1 and set2: " + set1);
   }
}

In this example, we create two sets, set1 and set2, and add some elements to them.

Then we use the removeAll() method to remove all the elements in set2 from set1, which gives us the difference between the two sets.

Finally, we print the result to the console.

The output of this program will be:

Difference between set1 and set2: [1, 2]

As you can see, the difference between set1 and set2 is [1, 2].


In conclusion, calculating the difference between two sets is a simple task in Java, and can be accomplished using the HashSet class and the removeAll() method.

This operation can be useful in a variety of programming contexts, and can help you manipulate sets of data efficiently.