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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in C++

Solution: Remove Duplicate Letters

Explore a stack-based greedy solution to remove duplicate letters from a string while ensuring the result is lexicographically smallest. Understand how to use a frequency map and a visited set alongside a stack to build the solution efficiently with O(n) time complexity.

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Statement

You are given a string, s, consisting only of lowercase English letters. Your task is to remove duplicate letters so that:

  1. Each letter appears only once in the resulting string.

  2. The resulting string is the smallest in lexicographical order among all possible results that satisfy the above condition.

Return the final string.

A string, a, is considered lexicographically smaller than string b if:

  • In the first position where they differ, the character in a appears earlier in the alphabet than in b.

  • If a is a ...