Restricting name characters (legacy)

This is a legacy behavior. By default IDA keeps names as they come from symbols, demanglers and debug information. You only need this page if you deliberately want to restore the old behavior, where names were forced into a restricted character set.

Historically, IDA replaced any character that was not part of a configured character set with _ before storing or displaying a name. This is governed by settings in the configuration file IDA.CFG:

• GarbleNames — a bitmask selecting which names are restricted (bit 0x1: symbol names in storage; bit 0x2: symbol names when displayed). The default 0 keeps names verbatim. This is a property of the database: it is frozen when the database is created and the configuration only seeds newly created databases.

• NameChars — the characters allowed in user-defined (symbol) names.

• MangleChars — the characters allowed in mangled names.

• TypeNameChars — the characters allowed in type names.

See the comment next to each setting in IDA.CFG for the exact syntax.