Weird search and replace behaviour after removing apostrophes

Hi David, I'm running an old version of Price Taptestry (12/10A) and I'm getting weird behaviour on the search and replace filter.

I'm pulling in a feed which contains Men's, Women's and Child's in the product name. I've applied a patch I found somewhere on here to remove the apostrophes. I added the following code to includes/admin.php:

$importRecord["name"] = str_replace("'", "", $importRecord["name"]);
/* create normalised version of product name for use in URLs */
$normalisedName = tapestry_normalise($importRecord["name"]);

and that certainly removes the apostrophes but when I then try to do a search and replace on the resulting Mens, Womens or Childs it fails. Yet replacing Men, Women or Child works so it's as if there's some extra character before the s.

Any ideas what's going on ?

Thanks in advance

Phil