Like the others, I was a bit confused by the exact request. But here is another solution that returns the #s, which I'm wondering is what you want.

my %xref;
$xref{'NAME'} = 'NAME';
$xref{'DESC'} = 'DECSRIPTION';
$xref{'DATE'} = 'DATE';

while (<DATA>) {
#    s/(NAME|DESC|DATE)(\d*)/$xref{$1}/eg;
    s/(NAME|DESC|DATE)(\d*)/$2/g;

    print;
}

__DATA__
NAME010 DESC025 DATE009
NAME011 DESC035 DATE009
[download]

-jbWare