Does the following also fail for you? It uses python instead of (difficult to see in email) explicit spaces to get the 80 spaces.
Sorry; in my previous e-mail there was a wraparound induced by the e-mail composer. This one is hopefully better: $ echo " "| grep --color=always '[1-9]'
python2 -c 'print " " * 80, 1234' | grep --color=auto '[1-9]'
This one does work for a standard 80-char-wide (u)xterm.
