Solution: Longest Happy String

Explore how to construct the longest happy string while avoiding three identical consecutive characters by using the heaps pattern. Understand the max heap approach to prioritize character frequency and manage constraints efficiently. This lesson helps you implement and optimize the solution with Python for coding interviews.

We'll cover the following...

Statement
Solution
- Time complexity
- Space complexity

Statement

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

It comprises only the characters 'a', 'b', and 'c'.
It does not contain the substrings "aaa", "bbb", or "ccc".
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:

$0 \leq$ a, b, c $\leq 100$
$a + b + c > 0$ ...