Remove backslashes from url fields in .bib entry

Question

The problem I'm having is that urls with backslashes in the .bib file are not linking correctly.

I'm using Mendeley to generate a .bib file that gets imported and used in the references section of a document via the biblatex package.

Mendeley escapes some special characters in the url field with a backslash (so _ turns to \_). As I understand it, biblatex wants those urls without escaped characters, as is. This is most likely what's causing the problem.

So I'm figuring there isn't a clean package option that tells biblatex to do something proper with the backslashes in url fields. If there is, that would be an ideal solution to the problem.

If there's not, I was thinking of doing a for loop over the url fields within LaTeX and stripping any '\'. But I'm not yet familiar enough with LaTeX programming to do this.

Answer 1

If biber is used as a backend the solution is to use \DeclareSourcemap to clean the url.

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps[datatype=bibtex]{
    \map{
      \step[fieldsource=url,
        match=\regexp{\\_},
        replace=\regexp{_}]
    }
  }
}

Answer 2

To do it via a command line (for inclusion in other processing tool) you can do a short python script:

f=open("in.bib", "r")
for line in f:
    if "url" in line:
        print line.replace("\\_","_"),
    else:
        print line,

and launch it like this:

python filter.py > out.bib