How to manually expand a special variable (ex: ~ tilde) in bash

Question

I have a variable in my bash script whose value is something like this:

~/a/b/c

Note that it is unexpanded tilde. When I do ls -lt on this

Answer 1

Here is the POSIX function equivalent of Håkon Hægland's Bash answer

expand_tilde() {
    tilde_less="${1#\~/}"
    [ "$1" != "$tilde_less" ] && tilde_less="$HOME/$tilde_less"
    printf '%s' "$tilde_less"
}

2017-12-10 edit: add '%s' per @CharlesDuffy in the comments.