As touched on in kitchin's comment of 19-Jun-2007 03:49 and nilsandre at gmx dot de's comment of 17-Jul-2007 10:45, array_diff's behavior may be counter-intuitive if you aren't thinking in terms of set theory.
array_diff() returns a *mathematical* difference (a.k.a. subtraction) of elements in array A that are in array B and *not* what elements are different between the arrays (i.e. those that elements that are in either A or B but aren't in both A and B).
Drawing one of those Ven diagrams or Euler diagrams may help with visualization...
As far as a function for returning what you may be expecting, here's one:
<?php
function array_xor ($array_a, $array_b) {
$union_array = array_merge($array_a, $array_b);
$intersect_array = array_intersect($array_a, $array_b);
return array_diff($union_array, $intersect_array)
}
?>
