automatically replacing, e.g., <DF>, by umlaut?

[Ulrich Scholz]

Hi, I often have the problem that when I copy and past some text from
the console into Emacs, the umlauts are shown as sequence of
characters <DF> or \317 (number may be wrong).

Is there some function to automatically replace these strings by the
corresponding umlaut?

I know that the best solution would be to have the proper language
setting, font, character mapping, aso.  But for years now, I failed to
get it right and there is no sign that this could change.

Best,

Ulrich