ECMAScript 6 sets: union, intersection, difference

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Check out my book (free online): “Exploring ES6”. Updated version of this blog post: section “Union, intersection, difference”.

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A recent question by Dmitry Moskowski reminded me: ECMAScript 6 sets have no methods for computing the union (e.g. addAll), intersection (e.g. retainAll) or difference (e.g. removeAll). This blog post explains how to work around that limitation.

Union

Union (a ∪ b): create a set that contains the elements of both set a and set b.

    let a = new Set([1,2,3]);
    let b = new Set([4,3,2]);
    let union = new Set([...a, ...b]);
        // {1,2,3,4}

The pattern is always the same:

• Convert one or both sets to arrays.


• Perform the operation.


• Convert the result back to a set.

As explained in [1], the spread operator (...) inserts the elements of something iterable (like a set) into an array. Therefore, [...a, ...b] means that a and b are converted to arrays and concatenated. It is equivalent to [...a].concat([...b]).

Intersection

Intersection (a ∩ b): create a set that contains those elements of set a that are also in set b.

    let a = new Set([1,2,3]);
    let b = new Set([4,3,2]);
    let intersection = new Set(
        [...a].filter(x => b.has(x)));
        // {2,3}

Steps: Convert a to an array, filter the elements, convert the result to a set.

Difference

Difference (a \ b): create a set that contains those elements of set a that are not in set b. This operation is also sometimes called minus (-).

    let a = new Set([1,2,3]);
    let b = new Set([4,3,2]);
    let difference = new Set(
        [...a].filter(x => !b.has(x)));
        // {1}

Conclusion

This blog post showed how you can implement union, intersection and different for sets. Long-term, I expect JavaScript to have built-in functionality for this, e.g. via functions that operate on iterables (similar to Python’s itertools).

Further reading

1. ECMAScript 6: maps and sets