> It is octal. \234 should be 2*64+3*16+4 being ascii 170.

Decimal 170. ASCII only goes up to 126 (hex 7E). The character at decimal 170
would be something out of ISO 8859-1 or whatever character set your system
happens to be using. I would assume Emacs is only concerned with bytes, so
the files you produce are going to look different when interpreted through
different character sets.

There is a Unicode list where these kinds of things are discussed.


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list