Notation for current branch?

I wonder if there's an easy to use notation to refer to the current branch? which is expected be friendly to scripting.

For HEAD, there's @, which is short and concise.

But for the current branch, it seems one has to either use a not so friendly plumbing command, or grep/parse the output of `git branch`, since the latter doesn't even has any option to only print the plain name of the current branch, or maybe an option can be added to `git branch`?

Thoughts?