game development question:reading and writing game data to and from files

Hello all,
I've started work on a custom mud, and am trying to figure something out.
Each player will have a set of keys that will be stored, name, connect time, 
creation time, etc.
I was thinking of storing these in a map, but that requires that the map hold 
multiple values; something which the c++ map doesn't do.
So, I'm trying to figure something out.
I'd like to be able to store player data, and a list of the player's inventory 
so the objects can be recreated when the player connects somehow.
I would need to store object type, name, etc etc.
I'm not quite sure how I could achieve this easily; I could possibly itterate 
through the map once I've gotten the data type thing figured out and do 
something like write key=value.
Then when I loaded it I could just strtok on the = and set that up, but I'm not 
quite sure how I'd handle inventory and that.
This is the only snag I'm having so far, and I'm not able to move on without 
it, as I'm to the point where I need to start saving player data, so help would 
be really appriciated at this point. :)
Thanks,

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