PHP strip non alphanumeric

On EveryDayFiction.com, in the titles of the posts our editors insisted on including a non alphanumeric character.
The little dot that separates the title from the author. This causes havoc with a lot of my scripts and is really freaking annoying.

This handy little function strips all the non  alphanumeric character from the string.

function strip_non_alnum($str) {
$str = preg_replace(‘~^(\s*)(.*?)(\s*)$~m’, “\\2″, $str);
$str = ereg_replace(“[^[:alnum:] ]”,”",$str);
return $str ;
}