- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Greedy, Two Pointers, String, leetcode-1754, O(m * n), O(m + n)
Problem
You are given two strings word1
and word2
. You want to construct a string merge
in the following way: while either word1
or word2
are non-empty, choose one of the following options:
- If
word1
is non-empty, append the first character inword1
tomerge
and delete it fromword1
.- For example, if
word1 = "abc"
andmerge = "dv"
, then after choosing this operation,word1 = "bc"
andmerge = "dva"
.
- For example, if
- If
word2
is non-empty, append the first character inword2
tomerge
and delete it fromword2
.- For example, if
word2 = "abc"
andmerge = ""
, then after choosing this operation,word2 = "bc"
andmerge = "a"
.
- For example, if
Return the lexicographically largest merge
you can construct.
A string a
is lexicographically larger than a string b
(of the same length) if in the first position where a
and b
differ, a
has a character strictly larger than the corresponding character in b
. For example, "abcd"
is lexicographically larger than "abcc"
because the first position they differ is at the fourth character, and d
is greater than c
.
Example 1:
Input: word1 = "cabaa", word2 = "bcaaa" Output: "cbcabaaaaa" Explanation: One way to get the lexicographically largest merge is: - Take from word1: merge = "c", word1 = "abaa", word2 = "bcaaa" - Take from word2: merge = "cb", word1 = "abaa", word2 = "caaa" - Take from word2: merge = "cbc", word1 = "abaa", word2 = "aaa" - Take from word1: merge = "cbca", word1 = "baa", word2 = "aaa" - Take from word1: merge = "cbcab", word1 = "aa", word2 = "aaa" - Append the remaining 5 a's from word1 and word2 at the end of merge.
Example 2:
Input: word1 = "abcabc", word2 = "abdcaba" Output: "abdcabcabcaba"
Constraints:
1 <= word1.length, word2.length <= 3000
word1
andword2
consist only of lowercase English letters.