#2957 - Remove Adjacent Almost-Equal Characters

Medium • View on LeetCode • View on GitHub

Problem Description

You are given a 0-indexed string word.

In one operation, you can pick any index i of word and change word[i] to any lowercase English letter.

Return the minimum number of operations needed to remove all adjacent almost-equal characters from word.

Two characters a and b are almost-equal if a == b or a and b are adjacent in the alphabet.

Solution

/**
 * @param {string} word
 * @return {number}
 */
var removeAlmostEqualCharacters = function(word) {
  let result = 0;

  for (let i = 1; i < word.length; i++) {
    if (Math.abs(word.charCodeAt(i) - word.charCodeAt(i - 1)) <= 1) {
      result++;
      i++;
    }
  }

  return result;
};