Empty comment body shows "n/a" instead of nothing.

After posting here I searched several Drupal discussions and there are many complaints about "n/a" marring what would otherwise be perfect pages. It's really goofy that this internal result message is forced all the way through to the end user.

In Views, this behavior destroys the use of Hide if empty because the field is never empty.

So, one solution in Views is to not check_markup of an empty field, because that is what triggers "n/a" to be returned?.

Or maybe easier/faster to implement in Views is to check for a result of "n/a" and treat that as empty, just as 0 can be treated as empty?

Should be a simple hack but I don't know where to do it.

The patch fixes the problem -- thank you!

For others who use the fix, one side-consequence to note:

The patch treats a Comment that would otherwise show as "n/a" as empty so it does not output anything, including the CSS class views-field-subject. Therefore, any spacing or other formatting that was implemented via this class will not happen when there is no comment for a particular node.

I was using this class in a view to force a space at the bottom of the node before the next node. I can move this to the top of the node rather than the bottom, but that has consequences too. The only way I see to control the overall positioning of each node in a view is to diddle with the class of the first and/or last field of the node.

It would be wonderful to have a view node-level class -- one consistent class that wraps each node in a view, whatever it might contain, useful for inter-node spacing, possibly a background color, etc.