IDA Script: Remove empty auto labels

When working in IDA to reverse games, you can end up with lots of dummy/empty labels, that are auto generated when doing offset work. Here’s my script to remove them.

First how it happens.

You find a value you are interested in setting to a offset

Value in IDA

And then you right click and go down the offset menu, and review the choices.

Ida - Value as Offset

This just created a dummy label on every segment at offset 32h so it could display it to you.

IDA - Unreferenced Labels

Now you can remove these manually by selecting the line and pressing n then empting the name, and pressing ok.

IDA - Set Label as Blank

But that’s painful if you have hundreds of dummy labels. Roll on the power of IDC files, and lets get rid of those.

#include <idc.idc>

static main()
{
  auto seg, loc, flags;
  auto count;

  count = 0;

  seg = FirstSeg();

  while(seg != BADADDR )
  {
    loc = SegStart(seg);
    while( loc < SegEnd(seg) )
    {
      flags = GetFlags(loc);

      // Has a dummy label and no references, and not start of function, remove name
      if( ((flags & ( FF_LABL | FF_REF)) == FF_LABL) & ((flags & FF_FUNC) == 0))
      {
        MakeNameEx(loc, "", 0);
        count ++;
      }

      loc = loc + ItemSize(loc);
    }

    seg = NextSeg(seg);
  }

  Message("Removed %d empty labels\\n", count);
}

Now you can safely remove the non referenced auto labels. It leaves functions names, or those that don’t follow the auto label format loc_xxxxxx