I’ll say something about #1, but don’t have something to say about #2 right
now.



To strip apostrophes (or any character, you could use:

s = Replace(s, “’”, “”)

That’s taking a string  s, and replacing all apostrophes with nothing (a
zero-length string).



I suppose stripping out the apostrophes
is one way to go. If someone out there is a language expert, perhaps there’s
a more standard way of doing it, but it seems reasonable to me.



Also if you wanted to compare De Angelis and DeAngelis, you’d want to strip
out spaces, like:

s = Replace(s, “ “, “”)