alignment

[harven]

I try to align into columns whitespace-separated strings, with the
command  C-u M-x align  in text mode. Unfortunately, the command fails
if there are length 1 strings, e. g.

1 2 3
one two three

I had a look to the variable  align-rules-list, which gives the
following regular expression for alignment:

"\\(^\\|\\S-\\)\\([     ]+\\)\\(\\S-\\|$\\)"

This seems indeed to fail for length 1 strings.

bug ?
feature ?
should it be reported ?
any replacement for the regexp ?