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After having looked through quite a number of questions about inserting line breaks within URLs, I'm still wondering about a specific case: manual insertion of line breaks in a URL in biblatex. So the focus here is on manual and on biblatex. To be even more specific: I'm not using the hyperref package (since this seems to be a constraint under certain conditions).

So what I would like to know is simply: Is it really impossible to insert manual line breaks in URLs that are part of a biblatex reference?

The reasons why I'm assuming that it is impossible are that this question has no accepted answer (see in particular the last comment by the author) and that neither the answers to this question nor to this question mention a manual solution.

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    I'm not sure that this is particularly linked to biblatex, as anything processed by \url has the limitation that it's essentially verbatim input, so manual line breaks are out. – Joseph Wright Oct 09 '13 at 20:48
  • If this is so, all the better. The reason that I focussed on biblatex is that I wanted to clearly limit the scope of this question in order to avoid yet another URL + linebreak question with no clear solution (by which I mean that answers to these questions tend to be very diverse and different people favour different strategies, depending on their context. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be confusing and cumbersome to work your way through these answers...) – Christoph Oct 09 '13 at 21:03
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    this is implied by joseph's answer, but to drive the point home, if you insert anything into a url that isn't natively part of it, it's not going to link properly, and anyone trying to use it for that purpose will have to reconstruct it by hand for a browser to recognize it and act on it properly. – barbara beeton Oct 09 '13 at 22:03
  • So if things are that simple, why doesn't someone just put this into an answer, I'll accept it and we're done? – Christoph Oct 11 '13 at 17:44

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A URL (uniform resource locater) is a worldwide occurring only once, unique address. Is a character added or deleted, the URL could become invalid or points to a different Internet address.

Package url takes the complete as an argument given url and made it clickable. So \url{https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/137180} results in the pdf as a link to your question. If you now add a sign, for example a * or whatever, the url \url{https://tex.stackexchange.com/quest*ions/137180} becomes invalid in the pdf file.

If you have long urls it is better to use an automatic way to allow LaTeX to break an url without adding an special sign. Breaking could be done at .or /or ... There are several questions on this side showing this, for example Insert hyphenation point in BibTeX using PDFLaTeX and hyperref.

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