It would be nice if there were 'no seperator' variants of the the get and out methods that took an array of strings, 'const tr1_or_boost::array<key_type,T>& path', instead of 'const key_type &path'.
That falls into the category of path object, proposed by many people. For example: pt.get(path("a") / "very" / "long" / "path") Path object can then be made to accept iterators: array<const char *> src = {"a", "very", "long", "path"}; pt.get(path(src.begin(), src.end())) Some sort of path object will most probably replace current path parsing in the next revision.
On a side note the link to some of the examples such a changing the value type seems to be broken.
This link works for me: http://kaalus.atspace.com/ptree/examples/custom_data_type.cpp The example uses boost::any as data type and boost::any_cast to convert types. Best regards, Marcin