Removing stars from a string

String Stack Simulation

79.0% acceptance

Feb 25, 2026

3207

233

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.

Solution

Rust

Time O(n)

Space O(n)

LeetCode

solution.rs

impl Solution {
  pub fn remove_stars(s: String) -> String {
    let mut stack: Vec<char> = vec![];
    for c in s.chars() {
      if c == '*' { stack.pop(); } else { stack.push(c); }
    }
    stack.iter().collect()
  }
}