2390 - Removing Stars From a String.

Medium

You are given a string s, which contains stars *.

In one operation, you can:

• Choose a star in s.

• Remove the closest non-star character to its left , as well as remove the star itself.

Return the string after all stars have been removed.

Note:

• The input will be generated such that the operation is always possible.

• It can be shown that the resulting string will always be unique.

Example 1:

Input: s = "leet\*\*cod\*e"

Output: "lecoe"

Explanation: Performing the removals from left to right:

• The closest character to the 1^st star is 't' in "lee**<ins>t</ins>**\*\*cod\*e". s becomes "lee\*cod\*e".

• The closest character to the 2^nd star is 'e' in "le**<ins>e</ins>**\*cod\*e". s becomes "lecod\*e".

• The closest character to the 3^rd star is 'd' in "leco**<ins>d</ins>**\*e". s becomes "lecoe".

There are no more stars, so we return "lecoe".

Example 2:

Input: s = "erase\*\*\*\*\*"

Output: ""

Explanation: The entire string is removed, so we return an empty string.

Constraints:

• <code>1 <= s.length <= 10⁵</code>

• s consists of lowercase English letters and stars *.

• The operation above can be performed on s.