The central component of the library is the basic_ptree class template. Instances of this class are property trees. It is parametrized on key and data type, and key comparison policy; ptree, wptree, iptree and wiptree are typedefs of basic_ptree using predefined combinations of template parameters. Property tree is basically a somewhat simplified standard container (the closest being std::list), plus a bunch of extra member functions. These functions allow easy and effective access to the data stored in property tree. They are various variants of get, put, get_value, put_value, get_child, put_child. Additionally, there is a data function to access node data directly.

See the basic_ptree class template synopsis for more information.