strip leading zeros in awk program

Question

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.

I\'m more or les

Answer 1

You need this, assuming your variable is called month:

gsub ("^0*", "", month);

The ^ is the start anchor and 0* means zero or more 0 characters. So this effectively removes all 0 characters at the start of the variable.

By way of example (which also shows a way to do it to the middle number as well, before splitting the date apart, see the second gsub for that):

pax> echo '1/1/2013
03/12/2014
02/02/1965' | awk '{gsub ("^0*", "", $0); gsub ("/0*", "/", $0); print}'

1/1/2013
3/12/2014
2/2/1965