1047. Remove All Adjacent Duplicates In String

Difficulty

Easy

Topics

• Stack
• String

Companies

• Facebook
• Google

Hint

Utilize a stack to manage the characters and efficiently remove duplicates.

Problem Description

You are given a string s consisting of lowercase English letters. A duplicate removal consists of choosing two adjacent and equal letters and removing them.

We repeatedly make duplicate removals on s until we no longer can.

Return the final string after all such duplicate removals have been made. It can be proven that the answer is unique.

Examples

Example 1:

Input: s = "abbaca" Output: ca Explanation: For example, in "abbaca" we could remove "bb" since the letters are adjacent and equal, and this is the only possible move. The result of this move is that the string is "aaca", of which only "aa" is possible, so the final string is "ca".

Example 2:

Input: s = "azxxzy" Output: ay

Constraints

• 1 <= s.length <= 105
• s consists of lowercase English letters.

Solution

func removeDuplicates(s string) string {
	var stack []byte
	for i := 0; i < len(s); i++ {
		stack = append(stack, s[i])
		if len(stack) > 1 {
			stack = checkAndRemove(stack)
		}
	}
	return string(stack)
}

func checkAndRemove(stack []byte) []byte {
	if stack[len(stack)-2] == stack[len(stack)-1] {
		stack = stack[0 : len(stack)-2]
	}
	return stack
}