Maxima Function
parsetoken (string)
parsetoken converts the first token in string to the corresponding number or returns false if the number cannot be determined .
The delimiter set for tokenizing is {space, comma, semicolon, tab, newline}.
(%i1) 2*parsetoken("1.234 5.678"); (%o1) 2.468
For parsing you can also use function parse_string. See description in file 'share\contrib\eval_string.lisp'.