converting a substring of digits and keep what follows

[Skaperen]

i have a string with digits (possibly with a period) and something else at the end such as '1234.5foobar'. i want to extract and convert the number and get a string of what remains. if it were already a function, it would probably return a 2-tuple like (number,remaining_string). the use case goal is making a function that converts expressed time intervals in various fixed units such as '1wk1day3min5' -> 691385 or '2m7s' -> 127 or '1.1h' -> 3960. i know how to do this in single character steps as i have implemented this in C, before. i need the same thing in Python, now, and wonder if there is a shorter way using only what comes with Python (so i do not need to require the user of my code to install anything but Python, itself).