get_the_excerpt() is not returning an empty string when the_excerpt is blank?

I got it working. Here’s what I had to do in my utility function…

function get_link_excerpt(){
if(has_excerpt()){
$LinkExcerpt = strip_tags(substr(get_the_excerpt(), 0, 75 ));
return ": ".$LinkExcerpt."...";
}
return false;
}

error code: 523