I don't know if I have a logical error, but my `substr()` function is keep returning an empty string? My initial thought was that I am cutting the string wrong, however even with a lower starting value, I am getting null string in my dataframe column.

I have looked at this PHP question to get some information, but didn't work: [PHP: substr returns empty string](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35554695/php-substr-returns-empty-string)

Reproducible example-

```r
#Original Data set str() output
#'data.frame':  9245 obs. of  3 variables:
#$ Latitude   : num  29.7 29.7 29.7 29.6 29.7 ...
#$ Longitude  : num  -82.3 -82.4 -82.3 -82.4 -82.3 ...
#$ Census Code: chr  "120010011003032" "120010010004035" "120010002003009" "120010015213000" ...

#For example, even if I do this:
base::substr("120010011003032", 6, 1)

#Output : ""
#Desired output: 001100

```

I needed to cut census codes to generate tract information, and the tract information is usually first two being the state, next three the county, and the following six the tract.