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Various ways of doing this not sure which would be more efficient, it may depend on the average lenght of the string and the rules around how you want to split it up.

Simplest method:

01 i pic s9(4) comp.

perform varying i from +20 by -1 until Ws-emp-name(i:1) not = space end-perform

or string ws-emp-name delimited by space into ws-work-space pointer ws-emp-name-length end-string

not sure of the exact syntax of the string command please look at the cobol manual. but the ws-emp-name-length will be the string length +1.