- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Stack, String, Dynamic Programming, leetcode-1653, Greedy, O(n), O(1)
Problem
You are given a string s
consisting only of characters 'a'
and 'b'
.
You can delete any number of characters in s
to make s
balanced. s
is balanced if there is no pair of indices (i,j)
such that i < j
and s[i] = 'b'
and s[j]= 'a'
.
Return the minimum number of deletions needed to make s
balanced.
Example 1:
Input: s = "aababbab" Output: 2 Explanation: You can either: Delete the characters at 0-indexed positions 2 and 6 ("aababbab" -> "aaabbb"), or Delete the characters at 0-indexed positions 3 and 6 ("aababbab" -> "aabbbb").
Example 2:
Input: s = "bbaaaaabb" Output: 2 Explanation: The only solution is to delete the first two characters.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 105
s[i]
is'a'
or'b'
.