Symptoms
When I use an autocomplete control pointing to a SQL smartobject and the results contain an apostrophe ('), I can search using _and39 and it will show up.
Diagnoses
This is a bug, and it looks HTML Entity coding is the cause. The apostrophe character is and_39 so this would make sense.
Resolution
Using the Live Search property on the Autocomplete control resolves the issue. A bug was logged for this behavior.