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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in C++

Solution: Longest Happy String

Explore a heap-based approach to construct the longest happy string under given character count constraints. This lesson guides you through managing character frequencies and applying the heaps pattern to avoid three consecutive identical characters, enhancing your problem-solving skills for coding interviews.

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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 ...