url in Bibliography without period at the end

Question

I'm compiling a document with the essentially the following bib entry:

@misc{name,  
  title = {Title of Web Page},  
  howpublished   = {\url{http://somethinghere.com}}  
}

It compiles fine, but a period gets placed at the end of the url. Is there a way to avoid this? Thanks.

Answer 1

The period is being introduced by your bibliography style. Is the url by any chance the last element of the item's bibliography as rendered? Most, if not all, bibliography styles end entries with a period. I don't know of any bib styles in circulation which don't. You might try using the custom-bib package to define your own bibliographic style to avoid this. Just run latex makebst---if the package is correctly installed, this will give you a text-based interface in which you can define your style by answering a series of questions.

Answer 2

Hmm, this is an old question, so I doubt you still need the answer, but I had the same problem today and here is how I fixed it.

I use the plainyr style, but I will be making changes to it, so I copied plainyr.bst to a file nvc.bst and am now using the nvc style.

I looked for the formatting of the misc entries. In my style it looks like this:

FUNCTION {misc}
{ output.bibitem
  format.authors output
  title howpublished new.block.checkb
  format.title output
  howpublished new.block.checka
  howpublished output
  format.date output
  new.block
  note output
  fin.entry
  empty.misc.check
}

At the end the entry is formatted by calling fin.entry. If we look at this function, it looks like this:

FUNCTION {fin.entry}
{ add.period$
  write$
  newline$
}

The first thing that this function does is add the period, so I just copied this function like this:

FUNCTION {fin.entry}
{ add.period$
  write$
  newline$
}

FUNCTION {fin.entrywithoutperiod}
{ write$
  newline$
}

And finally, I updated the formatting of the misc entries to use the new function.

FUNCTION {misc}
{ output.bibitem
  format.authors output
  title howpublished new.block.checkb
  format.title output
  howpublished new.block.checka
  howpublished output
  format.date output
  new.block
  note output
  fin.entrywithoutperiod
  empty.misc.check
} 

I hope this is still in some way useful for you, or maybe it might be useful for someone else.

Edit:

Maybe the following solution might even be slightly better. Instead of modifying the misc type, I copied it, renamed it to site and modified that copy. Then I made all my website entries in my database of the type site. This way the changes for these site entries doesn't affect the other misc entries.

FUNCTION {site}
{ output.bibitem
  format.authors output
  title howpublished new.block.checkb
  format.title output
  howpublished new.block.checka
  howpublished output
  format.date output
  new.block
  note output
  fin.entrywithoutperiod
  empty.misc.check
}