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Solution: Longest Valid Parentheses

Understand how to implement a stack-based solution to identify the longest well-formed parentheses substring in a string. This lesson guides you through pairing parentheses using a stack to track indexes, calculate substring lengths, and analyze the solution's time and space complexity for optimal performance.

Statement

You are given a string composed entirely of ‘(’ and ‘)’ characters. Your goal is to identify the longest contiguous segment (substring) within this string that represents a “well-formed” or “valid” sequence of parentheses.

A substring is considered valid if:

  1. Every opening parenthesis ‘(’ has a corresponding closing parenthesis ‘)’.

  2. The pairs of parentheses are correctly nested.

Return the length of this longest valid substring.

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