Feeds: removing text from a title
I think this approach is fine for your use case, since it's so unlikely you'd intentionally begin a title or body with a colon on purpose.

I'd clean up the code a bit though for coding standards like

/**
 * Implements hook_node_presave().
 */
function my_module_node_presave($node) {
  if ($node-&gt;type == 'mytype') {
    $node-&gt;title = _my_module_my_function($node-&gt;title);
    $node-&gt;body[$node-&gt;language][0]['value'] =  _my_module_my_function($node-&gt;body[$node-&gt;language][0]['value']);
  }
}