Thanks for the posts and suggestions, I tried to use the solution posted by eg04lt3r, however the result was translated. In the end, I wrote a simple function that does exactly what I need. I'm sure a good regex would also work.
public static double string2double(String strValue) {
double dblValue = 0;
if ( strValue != null ) {
String strResult = "";
for( int c=0; c<strValue.length(); c++ ) {
char chr = strValue.charAt(c);
if ( !(chr >= '0' && chr <= '9'
|| (c == 0 && (chr == '-' || chr == '+'))
|| (c > 0 && chr == '.')) ) {
break;
}
strResult += chr;
}
dblValue = Double.parseDouble(strResult);
}
return dblValue;
}