Yesterday, I checked out the code directly from the SVN repository because, yeah, I'm this kind of guy, bleeding-edge one, and started to give a try to the bundled exemple of Google+ API. You have to do the usual stuff when using an API like getting API secret and stuff to make it works.

Once everything was correctly setup, I've encountered a common problem for non english speaking people — I mean whoever who has to use any other language : charsets ! I quickly went to have a look to the raw response from the Google server and the encoding was broken already. Though, I've decided to make the exactly same test on the server this blog is hosted since I've lately been in trouble on different project because of the PHP (configuration) version. And it was working (almost) perfectly...

I've quickly noticed that I didn't have a "default_charset" specified but it didn't make any change : the real problem was coming from Apache configuration ! On my httpd.conf, I had a "AddDefaultCharset" value. So kids, don't forget to configure your environnement to use UTF-8 as your default charset, it will save you some time...

In Apache :

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

In PHP :

default_charset = "utf-8"