st: destring, keeping leading zeros

["Nawar, Eric" <elj9@cdc.gov>]

I have a string variable which has the following distinct codes:

0123
123

I want to make the variable numeric, but I want to keep the leading zero
on the first code to keep them distinct.  A suggestion to a similar
posting was to format with leading zeros - but this would make both
codes "0123".

Thanks,
Eric

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