Remove slice of string from slice

Issue

I want to remove range of slice from slice like remove "A", "B" from "A" to "Z", but I want to make it efficient (I don’t know why in Go but in Python we can use hashmap).

The code below is the closest I can get but there are edge cases I miss:

func removeString(listOri []string, targetDelete []string) []string {
    newitems := []string{}
    for i := range listOri {
        for j := range targetDelete {
            if listOri [i] != targetDelete[j] {
                newitems = append(newitems, listOri [i])
            }
        }
    }

    return newitems
}

listOriginal := []string{"A", "B", "C", "D"}
listDelete := []string{"A", "B"}
listNew := removeString(listOriginal, listDelete)
result = "A","B","C","C","D","D"

Solution

It’s better (faster) to use a map to represent the items that are to be deleted. If there’s N things in the original list, and M things that are in the to-be-deleted list, your code (once the bugs are fixed) would run in O(NM) time, whereas a map-based solution will run in O(N) time.

Here’s example code:

package main

import "fmt"

func filter(src []string, del map[string]bool) []string {
    var dst []string
    for _, s := range src {
        if !del[s] {
            dst = append(dst, s)
        }
    }
    return dst
}

func main() {
    src := []string{"A", "B", "C", "D"}
    del := map[string]bool{"A": true, "B": true}
    fmt.Println(filter(src, del))
}

If you really need the to-be-deleted things to be a slice, you should convert the slice into a map first. Then the code is O(N+M) time.

Answered By – Paul Hankin

Answer Checked By – Marilyn (GoLangFix Volunteer)