Save first few digits of a string as a variable

Well, first of all, your "Mode" should be Onscreen Object Property, not object, since contentText is a property

Secondly, this is why you should learn some scripting coding because this is alot easier to write a simple script procedure to do the parsing.

What I see is that you need to get the first part of the string up to the first "space" character because I'm assuming that the base pay won't always be 5 characters long... might be longer, might be shorter... so you need your code to grab a variable length.

Here's how I'd write it in JAvaScript code.  You SHOULD be able to adapt this to VBScript as I'm using TestComplete objects/methods rather than native code.  

function getBasePay(basePayString) {
    aqString.ListSeparator = " ";
    result = aqString.GetListItem(basePayString, 0);
    aqString.ListSeparator = "|";

}

If you want to write it as a single line expression, to use in a keyword test, that can be done, too, but it's a bit more convoluted.

aqString.SubString(<your property>, 0, aqString.Find(<your property>, " ") + 1)