Hello, Basically boost::property_tree documention is incomplete and outdated. There is simply no documentation on what a "Translator" is, only by digging the source you are able to understand it can be used to convert fetched values before returning them. Same goes for "stream_translator", still no idea what it's useful for. What's worse is that the documentation contains WRONG ways of doings things, like it says to change the default '.' separator one should use: pt.get<float>('/', "p.a.t.h/t.o/v.a.l.u.e"); But this is actually done like this: pt.get<float>(boost::property_tree::ptree::path_type("p.a.t.h/t.o/v.a.l.u.e", '/')); Then there are all the quickbook formatting bugs there and there, I made a ticket summing all I've found here https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/3925 I hope someone will look after this because boost::property_tree has a great potential and it's a shame the documentation discourages people from using it. There's also obvious changes that ought to happen like being able to get the parent of a ptree node. My 0.02$ Philippe