Removing Leading Zeros

[Mark Martin]

Hi all,
I have sucked two substrings into two variables :

$index = substr $_, 35, 11;
$value = substr $_, 64, 6;

These variables may or may not have leading zero/s : 

000009/000099/000999........    and so on.

If they do I need to strip away the leading zeros.

Any ideas?

Mark