removing leading zero from an LCD

Inserting spaces did not fix my problem. Like most of my programming it now works by accident. I have no idea yet why it this works, but it does:

if(tmpred_value < 100) //chops off leading zero
{
red_value[2] = red_value[1];
red_value[1] = red_value[0];
red_value[0] = ' ';
}

if(tmpred_value < 10) //chops off leading zero
{
red_value[2] = red_value[1]; //was 1, 0
red_value[1] = ' '; //was 0
}

Thanks for the help,
Mike