Actionscript:   / HTML text issue from an old Flash 8 project

I built a project back in 2006 that's amazingly still alive and making lots of money for a client. I had a bit of code that would insert an   into a textfield for dummy spacing in between other letters. Out of nowhere, this stopped working for the client, and all the text was space-less. This is what I had:

StringUtil.searchReplace( myStr, _dummyChar, '<span class="textDummy">&nbsp;</span>' );

This now fails to insert a space. I tried just using an actual space, but since this is an html textfield, multiple consecutive spaces don't keep making more room. So, I added a space after the  , and magically, it works like it had in previous years:

StringUtil.searchReplace( myStr, _dummyChar, '<span class="textDummy">&nbsp;</span> ' );

Whew fun!