in reply to Clean Up downloaded "messy" script?

How about using the s/// operator (which you could know from sed)?

s/^\s*\d+://;

or, in a oneliner:

perl -lpe "s/^\s*\d+://;"

or run the following to get a full Perl script that does the cleanup:

perl -MO=Deparse -lpe "s/^\s*\d+://;"