Indexing into a string

[webmasterpdx]

I'm currently working with strings and something very inconsistent is going on.
Lets say I have a string, s, that is something like "This is a very nice day".

However, when I use s(3), it returns a number instead of "i".
I have to use CHAR(s(3)) to get the character.
Surely an index into a string should return a string.
Is there a faster way to index into a string to return a string? Anyone know?
Thanks
-Donald