Handling empty values returned from soap service

Actually, a kind user on StackOverflow already answered this for me -- sort of -- I just hadn't put it here.  

You can avoid having XPath put its node in the place of empty text by appending "/text()" to the end of the XPath expression that SoapUI provides.  It goes just before the closing brace ("}").

It would be better if SoapUI provided this when you chose the node, but there are so many things that would be better than what SoapUI does in regards to generating the XPath values it's hard to know where to start.  Anyway, that's a way you can do it if you need to.