I think the pink blobs in the third shot probably indicate the presence of a 'special' space character. In codeview window, position the cursor immediately after a blob and the character details will be displayed at the right end of the status line.
What does the fourth shot look like in Preview - it appears to have a space between almost every character - but if that's what you want I guess it's OK.
To address the issue jackie-w raises you could try replacing the nbsp at line beginnings with a marker, do the global replace, and then replace the markers with nbsp.
BR
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