In Joomla there is a very fast way to get the Page Title using the Joomla API and the method
JDocument::getTitle.
You can visit
this link for a more detailed description of the
JDocument::getTitle method.
Now you can take this one step further and modify the title by using the method
JFactory::getConfig and the function
setTitle.
Get Page Title
$doc = JFactory::getDocument();
$page_title = $doc->getTitle();
Modify Page Title
$con =& JFactory::getConfig();
$sitename = $con->getValue('config.sitename');
$doc->setTitle($page_title.' - '.$sitename);