Beginning in Visual COBOL V7.0 support for dynamic length data-items has been added to the COBOL language.

You can specify a data item as follows where the limit phrase is optional and defines the maximum size of the data-item.

01 my-field pic x dynamic length limit is 15.

The length of this field will change dynamically depending on it's current contents.

Example:

move "larger value" to my-field
display length of my-field
move "small" to my-field
display length of my-field
move space to my-field
display length of my-field
move "12345678901234567" to my-field
display length of my-field

The lengths that will be displayed are:

12
5
1
15

Please see the full documentation here