Maximum Consecutive Ones After Removal (Medium) — Practice with Code Visualizer

You are given a binary array nums consisting only of 0s and 1s. You must delete exactly one element from the array (the deletion is mandatory, not optional).

After deleting one element, determine the length of the longest contiguous sequence of 1s in the resulting array. If no such sequence of 1s exists after the deletion, return 0.

Key Observations:

The deletion of one element is compulsory—you cannot skip it.
After deletion, the array contains one fewer element, and you need to find the maximum consecutive 1s in this modified array.
Strategic deletion of a 0 between two sequences of 1s can merge them into a longer sequence.
If the entire array consists of 1s, you must still delete one, reducing the maximum possible length by 1.

If we remove the element at index 2 (the 0), the resulting array becomes [1,1,1], which contains 3 consecutive 1s. This is the maximum length achievable.

Removing the element at index 4 (a 0) transforms the array into [0,1,1,1,1,1,0,1]. The longest contiguous sequence of 1s is [1,1,1,1,1] with length 5.

Since all elements are 1s and we must delete exactly one element, the resulting array [1,1] has a maximum consecutive 1s length of 2.