import re


def replace_unescaped_utf_8_chars(input_text):
    """
    Unescapes characters like "&#x00c3;&#x00a4;" with their equivalents,
    e.g. "ö". Only necessary to support Python 2.7+.
    """
    pattern = re.compile(r"&#x00(\w{2});&#x00(\w{2});")

    def replace(match):
        byte_array = bytearray(map(lambda v: int(v, 16), match.groups()))
        return byte_array.decode("utf-8")

    return pattern.sub(replace, input_text)