- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Greedy, O(n + 26), Medium, Hash Table, Stack, leetcode-3170, String, Heap (Priority Queue)
Problem
You are given a string s
. It may contain any number of '*'
characters. Your task is to remove all '*'
characters.
While there is a '*'
, do the following operation:
- Delete the leftmost
'*'
and the smallest non-'*'
character to its left. If there are several smallest characters, you can delete any of them.
Return the lexicographically smallest resulting string after removing all '*'
characters.
Example 1:
Input: s = "aaba*"
Output: "aab"
Explanation:
We should delete one of the 'a'
characters with '*'
. If we choose s[3]
, s
becomes the lexicographically smallest.
Example 2:
Input: s = "abc"
Output: "abc"
Explanation:
There is no '*'
in the string.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 105
s
consists only of lowercase English letters and'*'
.- The input is generated such that it is possible to delete all
'*'
characters.