Thanks for all suggestions above. A "full paragraph" solution didn't work as the sample should appear in free-flowing text. So here's the approach (again, a full sample file) that did the trick for me:

=pod

This is a free flowing text where "I want E<32>these E<32>4 E<32>additional E<32>whitespaces to remain in HTML". Is this doable?

=cut

Apologies for not having thought about being more specific / providing sample code.