Extracting numbers from strings

[Richard in Reading <richard_in_reading@yahoo.co.uk>]

I'm using forell to search through elliptic curves and I want to extract the numeric value of the conductor preferably without using ellinit and ellglobalred which make it too slow.
As an example, I'd like to be able to replicate the following

forell(E,1,100,print(E[1]"\t"ellglobalred(ellinit(E[2]))[1]))

11a1    11
11a2    11
11a3    11
14a1    14
14a2    14

just by manipulating E[1] instead of dealing with E[2]. Hopefully this would be faster.

Thanks!

Richard