As an alternate solution to what you appear to be trying to do you could try: 
my $foo = "the lazy  brown   fox    jumped...";
$foo = "<pre>$foo</pre>";

[download]
The "pre" tag preserves white space in html.

In reply to Re: Looking for white spaces between words by fletcher_the_dog
in thread Looking for white spaces between words by TASdvlper

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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