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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in Go

Solution: Longest Happy String

Explore how to build the longest happy string from characters 'a', 'b', and 'c' while adhering to constraints on consecutive characters using heap data structures. Understand the step-by-step approach to prioritize character selection by frequency and avoid invalid substrings, resulting in an efficient and valid string construction strategy.

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Statement

A string is considered happy if it meets the following conditions:

  1. It comprises only the characters 'a', 'b', and 'c'.

  2. It does not contain the substrings "aaa", "bbb", or "ccc".

  3. The total occurrences of:

    1. The character 'a' does not exceed a.

    2. The character 'b' does not exceed b.

    3. The character 'c' does not exceed c.

You are given three integers, a, b, and c, representing the maximum allowable occurrences of 'a', 'b', and 'c', respectively. Your task is to return the longest possible happy string. If there are multiple valid longest happy strings, return any one of them. If no such string can be formed, return an empty string "".

Note: A substring is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string.

Constraints:

  • 0≤0 \leq a, b, c ≤100\leq 100

  • a+b+c>0a + b + c > 0 ...