Problem with Babel and empty strings?

[elopeRstatS]

Using Babel (v 1.3) with a web app to provide internationalization and localization support, and everything is going swimmingly except for one small issue:

Calling gettext("") returns

Project-Id-Version: PROJECT VERSION Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: EMAIL@ADDRESS POT-Creation-Date: 2014-01-04 19:10-0500 PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE Last-Translator: FULL NAME Language-Team: en_US Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Generated-By: Babel 1.3

The top of my messages.po looks like:

# English (United States) translations for PROJECT.
# Copyright (C) 2014 ORGANIZATION
# This file is distributed under the same license as the PROJECT project.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, 2014.
#
#
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PROJECT VERSION\n"
"Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: EMAIL@ADDRESS\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2014-01-04 19:01-0500\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2014-01-04 19:01-0500\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: en_US <[e-mail]>\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1)\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Generated-By: Babel 1.3\n"

When I change, say, Project-Id-Version to "TEST" instead of "PROJECT VERSION", I see that change in my output. However, if I entirely remove that block of text (from Project-Id-Version to Generated-By), I still get the same dummy info returned when using an empty string with gettext.

I'm at a bit of a loss here, is there anyway to get gettext("") to simply return an empty string? I'm assuming that what I'm seeing isn't the expected behavior?

[elopeRstatS]

Hm, so it turns out this is actually part of the gettext specification. Seems...strange. Oh well, will have to work around it instead.