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Solution: Remove Duplicate Letters

Explore how to remove duplicate letters from a string with a greedy stack-based algorithm. Understand how to track character frequencies and manage a stack to build the lexicographically smallest string containing unique letters efficiently, with linear time complexity and constant space usage.

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 prefix of b, then a is considered smaller.

Constraints:

  • 11 \leq s.length ...