the_author(0) is echoing the value to the site

I am setting up a blog for multiple people so I wanted the author name to display. In order to add some zest to it, I’m using sIFR to replace the first letter of the author name. That means I have to parse out the first letter, put that in a span by itself and then the rest of the name after that. After doing some digging in the codex, I constructed:

<?php
$authName = the_author(0);
$authFL = $authName{0};
$authLeftovers = substr($authName, 1);
?>


While it does set the variables correctly, it still echos the value of the_author to the page. This is contrary to what the codex says about giving the boolean a false value. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

I realize I can use get_userdata() to get the info I am looking for, but I thought that maybe this was a bug so I thought I would bounce it off y’all.