*** The mode line now contains a letter or character that identifies
the coding system used in the visited file. It normally follows the first dash.

A dash indicates the default state of affairs: no code conversion (except CRLF => newline if appropriate). `=' means no conversion whatsoever. The ISO 8859 coding systems are represented by digits 1 through 9. Other coding systems are represented by letters:

A alternativnyj (Russian) B big5 (Chinese) C cn-gb-2312 (Chinese) C iso-2022-cn (Chinese) D in-is13194-devanagari (Indian languages) E euc-japan (Japanese) I iso-2022-cjk or iso-2022-ss2 (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) J junet (iso-2022-7) or old-jis (iso-2022-jp-1978-irv) (Japanese) K euc-korea (Korean) R koi8 (Russian) Q tibetan S shift_jis (Japanese) T lao T tis620 (Thai) V viscii or vscii (Vietnamese) i iso-2022-lock (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) k iso-2022-kr (Korean) v viqr (Vietnamese) z hz (Chinese)

When you are using a character-only terminal (not a window system), two additional characters appear in between the dash and the file coding system. These two characters describe the coding system for keyboard input, and the coding system for terminal output.