Question 1: Another solution 

Tried using Unix utils tr and cut to get a sensible machine-readable
table from the supplied data.

Got frustrated and decided to use perl for regex match and capture.
Wrote cutit.pl

Made table.h for #include'ing in C program as a structure array
initializer (munge.c)

Wrote C program to take input text.txt (cut'n'pasted from supplied
data), used shell redirect to make picture1.txt ; then edited it to
make 6 lines as per supplied data text block at bottom.

I ended up with a bunch of NUL's and a strange umlauted 'y' in the
picture / output of C program  - not sure why.  8-char token was
apparent from the picture anyway.