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Minimum Changes for Distinct Adjacent Characters

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Problem statement

You are given a string s. In one operation, you may choose any position and replace its character with any lowercase English letter.

Return the minimum number of operations needed so that no two adjacent characters in s are equal.

Function

minimumChangesForDistinctAdjacentCharacters(s: String) → int

Examples

Example 1

s = "aaab"return = 1

Change the middle 'a' to 'b', producing "abab".

Example 2

s = "aaaaa"return = 2

Two replacements are sufficient, for example to obtain "ababa", and one replacement cannot break all four equal adjacencies.

Example 3

s = "abcde"return = 0

Every adjacent pair already contains different characters.

Constraints

1 <= s.length <= 200000.
s contains only lowercase English letters.