Extract characters that differ between two strings

Question

I have used adist to calculate the number of characters that differ between two strings:

a <- \"Happy day\"
b <- \"Tappy Pay\"
adist(a,b)          


        

Answer 1

You can use one of the variables as a regex character class and gsub out from the other one:

gsub(paste0("[",a,"]"),"",b)
[1] "TP"
gsub(paste0("[",b,"]"),"",a)
[1] "Hd"