Merge Close Characters
You are given a string s consisting of lowercase English letters and an integer k.
Two equal characters in the current string s are considered close if the distance between their indices is at most k.
When two characters are close, the right one merges into the left. Merges happen one at a time, and after each merge, the string updates until no more merges are possible.
Return the resulting string after performing all possible merges.
Note: If multiple merges are possible, always merge the pair with the smallest left index. If multiple pairs share the smallest left index, choose the pair with the smallest right index.
Example 1
Input
s = "abca", k = 3Output
"abc"Characters
'a' at indices 0 and 3 are close, so the right one merges into the left and no further merges are possible.Example 2
Input
s = "aabca", k = 2Output
"abca"Characters
'a' at indices 0 and 1 merge first, producing "abca", and the remaining 'a' characters are too far apart to merge.Constraints
- 1 <= s.length <= 100
- 1 <= k <= s.length
- s consists of lowercase English letters.