3784. Minimum Deletion Cost to Make All Characters Equal

You are given a string s of length n and an integer array cost of the same length, where cost[i] is the cost to delete the i^th character of s.

You may delete any number of characters from s (possibly none), such that the resulting string is non-empty and consists of equal characters.

Return an integer denoting the minimum total deletion cost required.

class Solution {
public:
    long long minCost(string s, vector<int>& cost) {
        vector<long long> sum(26);
        long long total = 0;

        for(int i = 0; i < s.size(); i++) {
            total += cost[i];
            sum[s[i] - 'a'] += cost[i];
        }

        return total - *max_element(sum.begin(), sum.end());
    }
};