[FLASH-USERS] Question about direct manipulation of Flash HDF5 data

[Cole Miller]

Hi all,

I'd appreciate some help in terms of processing HDF5 output
files from FLASH3.0 beta.  I've been able to run several of
the test problems successfully and have used the xflash3 widget
to produce images, do 1-d readout, et cetera.  So far, so good.
However, for serious processing I need to be able to do a number
of other things.  For example:

1. At a given x,y,z point in the simulation region, what is the
    time history of the pressure?

2. What is the temperature over a uniform grid at a given time slice,
    resampled from a nonuniform AMR grid?

Basically, I'd like more direct control over the data.

In principle I suppose that since an IDL widget can access this
information, there should be a way to print it out directly from
IDL.  However, I haven't used IDL before; any suggestions?  I have
also tried to use the h5dump feature on individual files, but I
have no experience with the output format (DDL or XML), and it
looks like it would be a major endeavor to extract the required
information from the ASCII output.  I've also tried, briefly, to
look through some of the C routines on the HDF site that are supposed
to be able to read HDF5 files, but have yet to surmount difficulties
related to various libraries to which I need to link (maybe this can
be solved by setting PATH variables in some way?).

Anyway, any help would be great!

Thanks,
Cole