title: strip leading zeros in awk program
body: <p>So I'm pretty lost as I missed a week and am playing catch up, but I'm to write an awk program to tell the difference, in days, between two dates.</p>
  
  <p>I'm more or less done with it, however it doesn't like it if the user inputs 01/01/YYYY when doing my data validation. I pull the 3 fields out of the arg then pass them to a function to validate.</p>
  
  <p>the part that's giving me trouble is, in my validation:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if ( day &gt; Days[month] ){
  invalid stuff here
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where <code>Days[]</code> is an array holding [1]=31, [2]=28 (or 29 if leap) etc.</p>
  
  <p>It hits true because Days[01] is not defined. I could go around it by defining a [01] as the same as [1] I suppose but I'd rather something more elegant.</p>
  
  <p>How can I strip the leading zeros, within the awk program, of the variable month? Everything I've found is for use in a shell script and invokes awk, but that doesn't really help me.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for the help!</p>