Find uncommon characters of the two strings in C++ Program

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to find distinct characters from the given two strings. Let's see an example.

Input

string_one = "tutorialspoint"
string_two = "tutorialsworld"

Output

d n p w

We are going to use hashing to solve the problem. It's more efficient than writing two nested loop

Let's see the steps to solve the program.

Initialize the two strings with some random values.
Initialize a map as map<char, int> chars.
Iterate over the first string and insert each character into map with value 1.
Now, iterate over the second string.
- Check whether the character is already present or not.
- If present, assign 0 to it.
- If not present insert the character with value 1.
Iterate over the map and print characters with value 1.

Example

See the code below.

Live Demo

#include <bits/stdc++.h>
#include <map>
using namespace std;
void findDistinctCharacters(string one, string two){
   // initializing char presence in string
   map<char, int> chars;
   // iterating over the first string
   for (int i = 0; i < one.size(); ++i){
      // inserting every character into map
      chars.insert({one[i], 1});
   }
   // iterating over the second string
   for (int i = 0; i < two.size(); ++i){
      // checking whether the current char in string or not
      if (chars.count(two[i])) {
         // assigning 0 for common chars
         chars.find(two[i])->second = 0;
      }
      else {
         // insering new chars
         chars.insert({two[i], 1});
      }
   }
   // printing the distinct characters
   for (auto item: chars){
      // checking the presence
      if (item.second == 1) {
         // printing the distinct char
         cout << item.first << " ";
      }
   }
}
int main(){
   string one = "tutorialspoint";
   string two = "tutorialsworld";
   findDistinctCharacters(one, two);
   return 0;
}