You are given a string s
consisting of lowercase English letters.
You can perform the following operation any number of times (including zero):
'a'
and 'b'
, or 'b'
and 'a'
).Return the lexicographically smallest string that can be obtained after performing the operations optimally.
Note: Consider the alphabet as circular, thus 'a'
and 'z'
are consecutive.
Example 1:
Input: s = "abc"
Output: "a"
Explanation:
"bc"
from the string, leaving "a"
as the remaining string."a"
.Example 2:
Input: s = "bcda"
Output: ""
Explanation:
"cd"
from the string, leaving "ba"
as the remaining string."ba"
from the string, leaving ""
as the remaining string.""
.Example 3:
Input: s = "zdce"
Output: "zdce"
Explanation:
"dc"
from the string, leaving "ze"
as the remaining string."ze"
."zdce"
is lexicographically smaller than "ze"
, the smallest string after all possible removals is "zdce"
.
Constraints:
1 <= s.length <= 250
s
consists only of lowercase English letters.