Guys I have an interesting coding problem for you that I'm really stuck with

Guys I have an interesting coding problem for you that I'm really stuck with.

Say I have 2 lists of names. Both in random orders but with a few of them in both. I need to find out which names are in group B but not group A. How would I do this in excel or matlab?

To complicate matters further some entries aren't 100% similar but are very similar for example in list A a name might be Andrew B. Cosby and in group be just Andrew Cosby but obviously this is a match and should not be in my answer list.

Thanks guys!

Do you know any other coding languages? I don't think excel (and I dont know about matlab) is the best way to handle lists of stings.

>To complicate matters further some entries aren't 100% similar

I don't know what you mean with that but you can use the levenshtein difference with a tolerance level to find similar but not identical strings.

about the other thing,

repmat(A, N_b,1) - repmat(B,N_a,1)'

the zeros are your doubles.

Nigger if you have data like that you need to standarize it first

I don't really unfortunately, I'm a maths student so my using of coding is limited to calculations on matlab do you not think matlab or excel could handle something like this?

Would take for slow going but I think you're right. Any ideas how to do it with standardised data?

What language is this?

I mean if you've standardized the data you can just use sets. Or a terrible ugly for loop.

matlab

What command would you use to compare an element of A with an element of B?
What are the inputs in this case?