Min Deletion Cost No Consecutives | Dataford Interview Questions

A Chicagotrading market-data signal is represented by a string s. To make the signal unambiguous, its final form must not contain two equal characters next to each other. Deleting character s[i] costs cost[i]; determine the minimum total cost required to satisfy the rule.

You may delete any characters, and the remaining characters preserve their original order. Return only the minimum deletion cost, not the resulting string.

Formal Specification

Implement min_delete_cost(s, cost), where s is a string and cost is a list of integers with the same length. Return an integer representing the minimum cost of deletions needed so that no adjacent characters in the remaining string are equal.

Constraints

1 <= len(s) <= 10^6
len(cost) == len(s)
0 <= cost[i] <= 10^9
s may contain uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and symbols
The answer fits in a signed 64-bit integer

Function Signature

def min_delete_cost(s, cost):

Your question is Min Deletion Cost No Consecutives. Start with the requirements in the Question tab.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

Problem