Examples:
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 printf '%d\n' $(printf \'\\303\\244)
LC_ALL=en_US.ISO8859-1 printf '%d\n' $(printf \'\\344)
Both of these should print 228.
Like some other shells, incomplete or invalid multibyte characters yield the
value of the first byte without a warning.
Note that there is no general way to go back from the character code to the
character.