Funny but I can not remove symbol

Hey guy,

Need your urgent help, I got some text in mysql , that text contains very strange symbol which creates me problems in xml.
I can not even copy&paste that symbol into browser, browser can not see it, so I decide to make a picture of it.

Look at the symbol in front of Director

How to remove it ? I try preg_replace with preg_replace("/[^A-Za-z0-9]/","",$out); still doesnt go away, tried some other , nothing helps.

 

assuming $str = "*Director"

remove the first character from $str with the following:

$str = substr($str, 1, (strlen($str) - 1));

Code (markup):

 

It looks like the unicode character that represents the female gender (U+2640 ).
Pass the $out variable to the function below. It strips most of the unwanted Unicode characters.

 
function strip_symbols( $text )
{
    $plus   = '\+\x{FE62}\x{FF0B}\x{208A}\x{207A}';
    $minus  = '\x{2012}\x{208B}\x{207B}';
 
    $units  = '\\x{00B0}\x{2103}\x{2109}\\x{23CD}';
    $units .= '\\x{32CC}-\\x{32CE}';
    $units .= '\\x{3300}-\\x{3357}';
    $units .= '\\x{3371}-\\x{33DF}';
    $units .= '\\x{33FF}';
 
    $ideo   = '\\x{2E80}-\\x{2EF3}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{2F00}-\\x{2FD5}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{2FF0}-\\x{2FFB}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{3037}-\\x{303F}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{3190}-\\x{319F}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{31C0}-\\x{31CF}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{32C0}-\\x{32CB}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{3358}-\\x{3370}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{33E0}-\\x{33FE}';
    $ideo  .= '\\x{A490}-\\x{A4C6}';
 
    return preg_replace(
        array(
        // Remove modifier and private use symbols.
            '/[\p{Sk}\p{Co}]/u',
        // Remove mathematics symbols except + - = ~ and fraction slash
            '/\p{Sm}(?<![' . $plus . $minus . '=~\x{2044}])/u',
        // Remove + - if space before, no number or currency after
            '/((?<= )|^)[' . $plus . $minus . ']+((?![\p{N}\p{Sc}])|$)/u',
        // Remove = if space before
            '/((?<= )|^)=+/u',
        // Remove + - = ~ if space after
            '/[' . $plus . $minus . '=~]+((?= )|$)/u',
        // Remove other symbols except units and ideograph parts
            '/\p{So}(?<![' . $units . $ideo . '])/u',
        // Remove consecutive white space
            '/ +/',
        ),
        ' ',
        $text );
}

PHP:

Source :http://nadeausoftware.com/articles/2007/09/php_tip_how_strip_symbol_characters_web_page