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Solution: Longest Happy String

Understand how to build the longest happy string containing 'a', 'b', and 'c' characters without three identical consecutive characters. Explore using a max heap to prioritize characters by frequency while respecting constraints, learning an efficient approach with O(k) time complexity where k is the sum of character limits. Learn to apply heap operations strategically to solve character frequency problems in coding interviews.

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:

  • 00 \leq a, b, c 100\leq 100

  • a+b+c>0a + b + c > 0 ...