[...] The documentation also requires attention from a native English speaker to correct the various grammar errors.
My english is far from perfect. I would be very grateful if a native speaker could skim the docs and point me towards several most glaring errors.
The library seems very well suited to read and save XML configuration files. I would suggest, however, that versions of read/write_xml are introduced that allow to specify the special keys for attributes, comments and text. Also, a flag should be added that specifies whitespace handling. (Ignore, preserve, collapse.)
Agreed. XML parser definitely needs more flexibility. All the above improvements are easy to implement.
Additional suggestions: 1) Having a separate namespace for the interface of each parser seems to be overly verbose. The property_tree namespace is sparsely populated [...]
The namespaces issue has been also mentioned by other people before the review. One suggestion was to rename ptree class to property_tree, and place it directly in boost namespace. Current implementation has a virtue of being extremely conservative, trying to minimize number of names introduced into existing namespaces. Because fiddling with namespaces is quite a fundamental change for the library interface, it would be nice to gather more suggestions in this matter before making any decisions. On the other hand, this is probably something that should be addressed before the library becomes a part of boost (if ever), because maintaining backwards compatibility with current solution would be a madman's nightmare.
2) Add a parser for Java-like .properties files. The hierarchy could be built using common prefixes, i.e. [...]
I'm not familiar with .properties file format, but it looks easy to implement a parser with Spirit. If so, it could be a matter of a day or two to have it working.
3) The default separator should be settable. E.g. if I want to always separate my paths with '/' (I could be porting from a different library), I want to be able to write: pt.set_default_separator('/'); string libs = pt.get("build/dirs/libraries");
Agreed. I thought about it before, and came to a conclusion that the best way to implement it is to use preprocessor constant to allow user specify default separator, e.g. BOOST_PROPERTY_TREE_SEPARATOR. Thank you, Marcin