8

I have a bibliography in which URLs are printed with a following "." I would like to omit the URLs to save space and I could do this by redefining the URL command, but this would leave me with a dot. Is there a way to define a command that eats a following "."?

Stefan Müller
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    If all the URLs are in the form \url{...}., then redefine \url with two arguments to do nothing with them. Otherwise something slightly more complicated should be done. – egreg Nov 14 '12 at 09:28
  • Maybe you can pick or design a bibliography style that will omit the url fields? That would look like a more natural way of doing it, for example in case you have urls elsewhere in your text. – T. Verron Nov 14 '12 at 09:35
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    I have a bibliography that contains URLs they are set like \url{ ... }. I cannot influence this. So I have to redifine the url command to eat this dot. – Stefan Müller Nov 14 '12 at 09:37
  • @StefanMüller: but it should be easy to modify your bibliography style file. –  Nov 14 '12 at 12:04

2 Answers2

16

  • The redefinition of \url is not trivial, because the argument might contain the percent character. Therefore the argument needs to be read with verbatim catcodes.

  • The dot can be removed using \@ifnextchar.\@gobble{}. This also catches the case that \url{...} is not followed by a dot. As side effect \@ifnextchar removes spaces. This can be avoided by using \ltx@ifnextchar@nospace of package ltxcmds instead of \@ifnextchar.

Example file:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{url}
\makeatletter
\newcommand*{\urlgobble}{%
  \begingroup
    % set verbatim catcodes
    \let\do\@makeother
    \dospecials
    % restore catcode of argument braces
    \catcode`\{=1 %
    \catcode`\}=2 %
    \@urlgobble
}
\newcommand*{\@urlgobble}[1]{%
  % eats the URL in #1
  \endgroup
  % skip an optional dot
  \@ifnextchar.\@gobble{}%
}
\newcommand*{\skipurls}{\let\url\urlgobble}
\makeatother

\begin{document}
Normal url:
  \url{http://www.example.org/Hello%20World.html}

\skipurls
Skipped urls:
  \url{http://www.example.net/Hello%20World.html}
  \url{http://www.example.com/Hello%20World.html}.
\end{document}

Result

egreg
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Heiko Oberdiek
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  • Great answer (as usual); I've changed \urlgobble into \url in the final example, which seemed to be your intent, as \skipurl was given. – egreg Nov 14 '12 at 10:31
  • @egreg Thanks, it was a leftover from testing that I have forgotten to revert. – Heiko Oberdiek Nov 14 '12 at 10:47
5

Works only if the URL has no special characters!

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{url}
\begin{document}

\url{http://www.dante.de}.

\makeatletter
\let\URL\url
\def\url#1{\@ifnextchar.\url@i{\url@i.}}
\def\url@i.{}
\makeatother

Not printed: \url{http://www.dante.de}.

\URL{http://www.dante.de}

\end{document}

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