# 2957. Remove Adjacent Almost-Equal Characters """ 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 """ class Solution(object): def removeAlmostEqualCharacters(self, word): """ :type word: str :rtype: int """ i, k = 1, 0 while i + k < len(word): k += abs(ord(word[i + k]) - ord(word[i + k - 1])) < 2 i += 1 return k if __name__ == "__main__": obj = Solution() print(obj.removeAlmostEqualCharacters("aaaaa")) print(obj.removeAlmostEqualCharacters("abddez")) print(obj.removeAlmostEqualCharacters("zyxyxyz"))