Represent non-ASCII characters in URLS gives better page rank in search engines?

Question

Most part of the world uses non-ASCII characters. But some idioms use things like é, ö, á, ã, õ etc, which can be "converted" to ascii.

Suppose the title of the post is:

Configuração é fácil!

How to represent that in a URL?

www.myblog.com/post/1200/Configura__o-_-f_cil

A much better representantion is

www.myblog.com/post/1200/Configuracao-e-facil

Wikipedia do that as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_vu

Will this improve page rank in search engines?

How to do that in your favorite language?

Answer 1

In Perl

Use Text::Unidecode:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use utf8;
use Text::Unidecode;
print unidecode(
    "áéíóú\n"
);

# That prints: aeiou