How should I end sentences with a URL as the last word?

Question

For example,

The website I was referring to is hosted at http://english.stackexchange.com.

How should I place the fullstop at the end?

Answer 1

The official specification for Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) has a section titled “Wrappers for URIs in plain text” which recommends using angle brackets ‘<’ and ‘>’ for delimiting URLs when they appear in the context of a plain text message:

This section does not formally form part of the URL specification .

URIs, including URLs, will ideally be transmitted though protocols which accept them and data formats which define a context for them. However, in practice nowadays there are many occasions when URLs are included in plain ASCII non-marked-up text such as electronic mail and usenet news messages.

In this case, it is convenient to have a separate wrapper syntax to define delimiters which will enable the human or automated reader to recognize that the URI is a URI.

The recommendation is that the angle brackets (less than and greater than signs) of the ASCII set be used for this purpose.

These wrappers do not form part of the URL, are not mandatory, and should not be used in contexts (such as SGML parameters, HTTP requests, etc) in which delimiters are already specified.

Example

Yes, Jim, I found it under <ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/doc> but you can probably pick it up from <ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc>.

If you follow this recommendation, the answer is easy: place the terminal punctuation after the closing angle bracket delimeter ‘>’.

Answer 2

Good question. It depends on the medium:

• If this is on a web page, and the URL is actually a link, there's no need to do anything: it will be clickable and do the right thing.

• In formatted text, use a clearly distinct font for the URL, with clearly different punctuation characters.

• In plain text, you could rewrite the sentence to avoid the problem, e.g.:

  At http://english.stackexchange.com you can find the website I was referring to.

• If this is not possible or desirable, you can put a space in front of the period to avoid confusion.

  However, that could cause the period to move to the beginning of the next line, which is ugly. Maybe the non-breaking space character could help, but it's hard to type and many computer programs don't handle it properly.

Answer 3

I'd say there's nothing wrong with putting a full stop at the end. The only thing I'd advise caution with is allowing the full stop to actually become part of a clickable link, as that clearly wouldn't work.

Bad:

The website I was referring to is hosted at http://english.stackexchange.com.

Good:

The website I was referring to is hosted at http://english.stackexchange.com.

Most things tend to do the right thing in these circumstances so I'd say it is just something to be aware of. From a grammatical (and aesthetic) point of view, the full-stop definitely ought to appear and shouldn't have a leading space.

In terms of just plain text, I'd say put the full stop there (since it does belong there) and assume that everyone knows not to actually try and type that in. I could imagine almost anyone who's had any contact with the internet will know that sites end in something like .com or .info, not .com. or .info.

For email addresses (as opposed to URLs), I'd say the same thing applies:

My email address is bob@example.com.