How to automate the replacement of special characters in URLs? The standard behavior (*) for friendly URLs in Drupal is replacing special characters by a hyphen in the friendly URL. 

For instance,  without any input from the user, versão becomes vers-o and  conteúdo becomes conte-do. However, we need the character to be replaced by their corresponding non-accent ASCII values, such as versao  and conteudo.

Currently, we manually edit the URL when creating content. Is there a way to automate it?



(*): I assume it's out-of-the-box behavior, but this Drupal instance had modules installed and configured by other persons, maybe it's not a default behavior.
Have a look at the Transliteration module. Here is a quote from its project page:


  ... it takes Unicode text and tries to represent it in US-ASCII characters (universally displayable, unaccented characters) by attempting to transliterate the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system to Roman letters.


As a sample, it transforms an URL like mydomain.com/последние-новости-в-Украине-и-мире in something like mydoamin/poslednie-novosti-v-Ukraine-i-mire.

However, to actually make this work, you also need to enable the Pathauto module. After that, go to the Pathauto setting page and check "Transliterate prior to creating alias". For more details on that, refer to "D7 Pathauto transliteration". Attention: this does not "fix" already created aliases (those need to be deleted and recreated).