What happens when you try it?

If you want to avoid an if/else for the two similar cases, you can do a substitution like this:

s/\xa0(\d)*/defined $1 ? ' ' : ''/e;
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If you want to loop over several values, doing this to each of them, you can do it like this:

for ( $x, $y, $z ) {
    s/\xa0(\d)*/defined $1 ? ' ' : ''/e;
}
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That should work also for some method that returns a list, but it will die if that list contains a read-only value (such as a literal).

I don't know if this answers your question, but I hope you find it useful anyway.