GNU Emacs Manual - Multibyte Conversion

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## Unibyte and Multibyte Non-ASCII characters

When multibyte characters are enabled, character codes 0240 (octal) through 0377 (octal) are not really legitimate in the buffer. The valid non-ASCII printing characters have codes that start from 0400.

If you type a self-inserting character in the invalid range 0240 through 0377, Emacs assumes you intended to use one of the ISO Latin-n character sets, and converts it to the Emacs code representing that Latin-n character. You select which ISO Latin character set to use through your choice of language environment (see above). If you do not specify a choice, the default is Latin-1.

The same thing happens when you use `C-q` to enter an octal code in this range.

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