Return only content in excerpt field in loop

Question

I am sure this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find the answer, although it seems simple enough. I have built a custom theme based on another person's design. He uses both the excerpt and the body on the archive pages (using the excerpt as a verbose subhead) and the first 20 words of post's body as the excerpt.

For this site, all posts will have a body, but not all posts will have the excerpt.

If the excerpt field is blank, I don't want an excerpt to show, unfortunately WP auto-pops the_excerpt() and get_the_excerpt() with a truncated chunk of the content.

Is there a way - in The Loop - to only show an excerpt if the actual excerpt field is populated - that is without doing yet another DB call or using custom fields?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Would the has_excerpt() function work?

The Codex says of it: Whether the current post has an excerpt.