Transform attribute

["Lars Eirik Rønning"]

Hi.
Is there an easy way for me to retrieve the affine transformation such as an element's matrix from an exisiting svg file and alter only the translation aspect of the matrix?
I was hoping i could get this as a string attribute and then have a object which allowed me to extract the values i wanted without having to parse the string..
When the values are altered i would like to insert this back as a string into the svg file.

Thanks
Lars