Problem 564. How to subtract?

Created by AMITAVA BISWAS

Like (7)

Solve Later

&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.

Solve

Solution Stats

8327 Solutions
1516 Solvers

Last Solution submitted on May 27, 2025

Last 200 Solutions

Problem Comments

9 Comments

9 Comments

Show 6 older comments

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

Solution Comments

Show comments

Problem Recent Solvers1516

Problem Tags

Community Treasure Hunt

Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!

Start Hunting!

Problem 564. How to subtract?

Solution Stats

Last 200 Solutions

Problem Comments

Solution Comments

Problem Recent Solvers1516

Suggested Problems

More from this Author100

Problem Tags

Community Treasure Hunt

Problem 564. How to subtract?

Solution Stats

Last 200 Solutions

Problem Comments

Solution Comments

Problem Recent Solvers1516

Suggested Problems

More from this Author100

Problem Tags

Community Treasure Hunt

Players