Solution: Remove Duplicate Letters

Explore how to use a greedy stack-based approach to remove duplicate letters from a string while ensuring the result is the lexicographically smallest possible. Understand how frequency tracking, a visited set, and stack operations work together to achieve an optimal solution.

We'll cover the following...

Statement
Solution
- Time complexity
- Space complexity

Statement

You are given a string, s, consisting only of lowercase English letters. Your task is to remove duplicate letters so that:

Each letter appears only once in the resulting string.
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:

$1 \leq$ s.length ...