What is the potential issue with leading zeros in PHP variables?

Leading zeros in PHP variables can cause unexpected behavior when performing arithmetic operations or comparisons. This is because PHP interprets variables with leading zeros as octal numbers. To solve this issue, you can use the `intval()` function to convert the variable to an integer, which will remove any leading zeros.

$number = '0123';
$number = intval($number);
echo $number; // Output: 123