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Why does Shortest not work in a SequencePosition call? The following two commands return the same answer:

SequencePosition[{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}, {a_, ___, b_}]
(*    {{1, 5}, {2, 5}, {3, 5}, {4, 5}}    *)
SequencePosition[{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}, {a_, Shortest[___], b_}]
(*    {{1, 5}, {2, 5}, {3, 5}, {4, 5}}    *)

I would prefer it if the second one returned

(*    {{1, 2}, {2, 3}, {3, 4}, {4, 5}}    *)

Do you know how to achieve this behavior?

Notice that the closely related StringPosition works as expected:

StringPosition["12345", a_ ~~ ___ ~~ b_]
(*    {{1, 5}, {2, 5}, {3, 5}, {4, 5}}    *)
StringPosition["12345", a_ ~~ Shortest[___] ~~ b_]
(*    {{1, 2}, {2, 3}, {3, 4}, {4, 5}}    *)

Related:

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  • $\begingroup$ Forwarded to Wolfram Support as unexpected behavior. $\endgroup$
    – Roman
    Jun 9, 2019 at 11:43
  • $\begingroup$ Confirmed by Wolfram Support as unexpected behavior [CASE:4269719]. $\endgroup$
    – Roman
    Jun 13, 2019 at 7:53
  • $\begingroup$ It's no surprise StringPosition doesn't share the problem - it is based on a common (textual) regular expression matcher (was it PCRE?), while the pattern matcher in Mathematica is their own. $\endgroup$
    – kirma
    Jun 13, 2019 at 10:54

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