well, a problem I see with returning all the data in a specific section is this. If you want it to return the actual data (ie 800, 600 or "hello" or whatever) then you will need a uniform way to store dissimilar types in the functions return (if indeed a section can mix text and values of other sorts). You could make this into a two stage process. Firstly, you use the stream function getline, to scan the file for the section you require (if you wish to be able to specify parts of the section throughout the file, then this could be more complex). Once the section is found... you read the lines of that section into a list (or vector or whatever you prefer) of strings. This list is what will be returned, and your calling function will have to provide its own parser. That it so say, it will have a struct for each section, corresponding to every possible field, and based on the value before the "=" it will appropriately convert the value (eg to string/int/float/whatever it expects) and place it within the struct. This should be fairly straightforward to implement... but depending on how insulated you want the calling function to be from the mechanics of the config file, you may or may not wish to take this step of converting the list of strings into a struct out of the calling function into a set of standalone config parsers. If you want this system to be more general, then you''ll probably have to return a list two lists, one list of structures with values and names of all integer datamembers, and one list of all string type data members. This method is probably the most general, and potentially useful to the widest range of applications.

ah, it just struck me that you might not be using C++ and have the benefits of the STL, in which case this whole setup might not be that sensible. oh well :S.

Look into GetPrivateProfileInt and GetPrivateProfileString on MSDN. They do exactly what you want with a simple function call...