plpythonu: Read

The application "foo" uses this plpythonu source code to read the custom variable foo.transaction_id. I guess this is way too complicated. How to shorten/simplify below lines? txid_list = list(plpy.execute( '''SELECT current_setting FROM current_setting('foo.transaction_id')''')) txid_str = txid_list ['current_setting'] txid = int(txid_str)