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 "lee**t*code". s becomes "leecode".
• 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.

Time limit exceeded

def clearStars(self, s: str) -> str:
    i = 0
    while i < len(s):
        if s[i] == '*':
            mini = i - 1
            j = i - 2
            while j > -1:
                if s[j] < s[mini]:
                    mini = j
                j -= 1
            s = s[:i] + s[i+1:]
            s = s[:mini] + s[mini+1:]
            i -= 2  # adjust for removed chars
        i += 1
    return s

05-07-2025

def removeStars(self, s: str) -> str:
	res = []
	for i in s:
		if i == '*':
			res.pop()
		else:
			res.append(i)
	return ''.join(res)