2390. Removing Stars From a String

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 1st star is 't' in "leet**code". s becomes "leecod*e".
• The closest character to the 2nd star is 'e' in "leecode". s becomes "lecod*e".
• The closest character to the 3rd star is 'd' in "lecod*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:

1 <= s.length <= 105 s consists of lowercase English letters and stars *. The operation above can be performed on s.