Override HTML characters for date when the date is used in a title

I am using the rules module to add a date from the node into the title. I can use either the [node:field_date_of_meeting-value] (The raw date value) or [node:field_date_of_meeting-view] (the formatted date) and I end up with HTML characters in my title: <span class="date-display-single">2009/06/11 - 8:30am</span>. This is obviously not desirable, because node titles do not use HTML and instead the HTML characters are printed to the screen. In Drupal 5, I simply deleted these characters from a date theme file (I know, a hack), but now I can't even seem to find the right file to hack to get rid of this problem (probably because Drupal 6 has a variable system that makes theming easier-- although in this case, I'm not sure). I have responded to the requests to add a "raw" html free date token, but there hasn't been much activity on those threads, so I thought I would see if there is an easy way to override this behavior. Thank you for any help!