花花酱 LeetCode 1717. Maximum Score From Removing Substrings

You are given a string s and two integers x and y. You can perform two types of operations any number of times.

• Remove substring "ab" and gain x points.
  • For example, when removing "ab" from "cabxbae" it becomes "cxbae".
• Remove substring "ba" and gain y points.
  • For example, when removing "ba" from "cabxbae" it becomes "cabxe".

Return the maximum points you can gain after applying the above operations on s.

Example 1:

Input: s = "cdbcbbaaabab", x = 4, y = 5
Output: 19
Explanation:
- Remove the "ba" underlined in "cdbcbbaaabab". Now, s = "cdbcbbaaab" and 5 points are added to the score.
- Remove the "ab" underlined in "cdbcbbaaab". Now, s = "cdbcbbaa" and 4 points are added to the score.
- Remove the "ba" underlined in "cdbcbbaa". Now, s = "cdbcba" and 5 points are added to the score.
- Remove the "ba" underlined in "cdbcba". Now, s = "cdbc" and 5 points are added to the score.
Total score = 5 + 4 + 5 + 5 = 19.

Example 2:

Input: s = "aabbaaxybbaabb", x = 5, y = 4
Output: 20

Constraints:

• 1 <= s.length <= 105
• 1 <= x, y <= 104
• s consists of lowercase English letters.

Solution: Greedy + Stack

Remove the pattern with the larger score first.

Using a stack to remove all occurrences of a pattern in place in O(n) Time.

Time complexity: O(n)
Space complexity: O(1)