Merge Alternating Characters

You are given two strings A and B. Your task is to merge them by alternating their characters, starting with the first character of A. If one string is exhausted before the other, simply append the remaining characters of the other string at the end.

This can be expressed mathematically as follows:

\[ \text{result} = \bigcup_{i=0}^{\min(|A|,|B|)-1} (A_i, B_i) \cup \text{remaining characters} \]

For example, if A = "abc" and B = "1234", then the result is "a1b2c34".

inputFormat

The input consists of two lines:

• The first line contains the string A.
• The second line contains the string B.

outputFormat

Output the merged string as per the described algorithm.

abc
1234

a1b2c34