Can you provide examples of best practices for handling leading zeros in PHP?

When working with numbers that have leading zeros in PHP, it is important to handle them correctly to prevent unexpected behavior. One common approach is to use the `ltrim()` function to remove any leading zeros from the number before performing any operations on it.

// Example of handling leading zeros in PHP
$number = '00123';
$number = ltrim($number, '0');
echo $number; // Output: 123