List item with a span inside

I have list items with spans in them, and I'd like to strip the spans out before the list item is returned by selectnav, how do I go about this? eg

 `<li><a href="somelink.html">Chapter Here <span>description here</span></a></li>`

selectnav returns the list item as `Chapter Heredescriptionhere` but I want to remove that description span. 

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks.
