How to deal with a tilde in url's in Mendeley?

Question

If a link in an url contains ~, Mendeley changes it to $\sim$ and hyperref links just don't work. I use pdflatex and biblatex. Is there a quick way how to change manually the link in Mendeley to fix this? Editing manually the library.bib file exported by Mendeley is not an option for me.

Answer 1

This is definitely something you need to address on a Mendeley level, the software needs to make sure it exports correct .bib files, and http://example.edu/$\sim$elk/bronto.pdf is hardly correct. URLs should be exported verbose without any modifications.

But with Biber's sourcemapping we can try and save your file, let's say you have

@online{bronto,
  author  = {Anne Elk},
  title   = {Towards a Unified Theory on Brontosauruses},
  date    = {1972-11-16},
  url     = {http://example.edu/$\sim$elk/bronto.pdf},
  urldate = {2015-09-07},
}

Then

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps{
    \map{
      \step[fieldsource=url,
            match=\regexp{\$\\sim\$},
            replace=\regexp{\~}]
    }
  }
}

will turn that $\sim$ back into a ~.

MWE

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@online{bronto,
  author  = {Anne Elk},
  title   = {Towards a Unified Theory on Brontosauruses},
  date    = {1972-11-16},
  url     = {http://example.edu/$\sim$elk/bronto.pdf},
  urldate = {2015-09-07},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{biblatex}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\DeclareSourcemap{
  \maps{
    \map{
      \step[fieldsource=url,
            match=\regexp{\$\\sim\$},
            replace=\regexp{\~}]
    }
  }
}

\begin{document}
\nocite{bronto}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

Answer 2

So, one simply has to replace in the url in Mendeley ~ with \textasciitilde{}. Then it works. Note that I have the option "do not escape latex special characters" in Mendeley.