Well, he said, "any spaces" so I figured that's what he was looking for.
I had run a script called "machine_info" that I copied from the "Essential Systems Administration" manual and edited to my needs on my RS6000's. When the script finished I had to break down spaces and do other formatting to it to make a readable Excel spreadsheet. To do this I had to redefine my spaces. For instance I used that command and put in however many spaces I needed and replaced them with a character that did not exist in the output (i.e., s/{2spaceshere}/;/g) would put a ";" in the place of 2 spaces, I know it will work, it's kind of cumbersome, but it did the trick. There's probably a perl or maybe a troff solution, but I don't do troff, and the box didn't have perl so I went with what I had.