Bash bad substitution with subshell and substring

Question

A contrived example... given

FOO=\"/foo/bar/baz\"

this works (in bash)

BAR=$(basename $FOO) # result is BAR=\"baz\"
BAZ=${BAR         


        

Answer 1

${string:0:1},string must be a variable name

for example:

FOO="/foo/bar/baz"

baz="foo"

BAZ=eval echo '${'"$(basename $FOO)"':0:1}'

echo $BAZ

the result is 'f'