URLs in bibtex

A source of frustration for me over the past month or so has been how bibtex has handled URLs in the citations of my german coursework. Firstly I tried something like the following:

@misc{foo,
author = "{\url{www.example.com}}",
title = "{Foobar}"
}

and then \usepackage{url} in my main document, however this was rather messy and also didn’t work (can’t remember the errors, but something concerning the fact that the url wasn’t fixed and so latex couldn’t precalculate).

Solution

As the document in question is written in german, I was using the babelbib bibtex styles. These allow bibliographies to be in languages other than english:
e.g. “Literaturverzeichnis” is used instead of “Bibliography”
The best bit: bibtex styles include support for urls.

@misc{wiki_ger_dialect,
    author = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German\_language\#German\_dialects\_ versus\_varieties\_of\_standard\_German",
    title = "{German dialects versus varieties of standard German}",
}

became

@misc{wiki_ger_dialect,
    url = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language#German_dialects_ versus_varieties_of_standard_German",
    title = "{German dialects versus varieties of standard German}",
}

My bibliography now looks much better, with URLs typeset in the typewriter font.

The bibliography using URLs.

See also: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=citeURL