Problem 564. How to subtract?

Created by AMITAVA BISWAS

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&plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn &plusmn

Imagine you need to subtract one number from another using MATLAB.
You will not be using eval for this task.
Given two ASCII strings representing two integers X and Y.
Each of them has only 12 or less ASCII characters.
Each of them represents signed integers, such as '+2345'
Please output the result of (X-Y) in a similar style.

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Last Solution submitted on Dec 07, 2025

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Mohamed Atyya on 30 Oct 2017

good

nipun garg on 8 Jun 2018

function z = mysub(x,y)
z = num2str( str2num(x) - str2num(y) );
end

why this is not working for this code?

Matt Offredi on 8 Mar 2019

Nice

Mark Sanderson on 14 Mar 2019

Hi. My code only prints out '-' for a negative number but not '+' for a positive. Can anyone help? function Z = mysub(X,Y); W = (str2num(X))-(str2num(Y)); Z = num2str(W); end

Rafael S.T. Vieira on 2 Jul 2020

actually each of them has 14 characters or less...15 if we count the signs.

Rafael S.T. Vieira on 2 Jul 2020

Mark Sanderson, if W > 0 Z = ['+' ...]

Valeriu Mihailov on 28 May 2022

how about solving this problem but not using any conversion functions like num2str , str2num , str2double ...

Brandon on 5 Jun 2023

This problem needed much larger test cases. At least beyond intmax('uint64') range. Also negative inputs were not implemented at all.

Suraj on 18 Feb 2025

hard

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Problem 564. How to subtract?

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Problem 564. How to subtract?

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Problem Recent Solvers1528

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