Alternating Odd and Even with a twist

I want to alternate rows between a odd and even class
in my CSS. The twist is that If there is no
information in the tag I don't want to print and I
want to maintain my odd and even structure. The html
would look like this
<class="rowodd">Hi</class>
<class="roweven">How are you?</class>
<class="rowodd">Bye</class>
xml:
<item1>Hi</item1>
<item2>How are you?</item2>
<item3>Bye</item3>
but say there was no information where How are you?
I want it to go:
<class="rowodd">Hi</class>
<class="roweven">Bye</class>
xml:
xml:
<item1>Hi</item1>
<item3>Bye</item3>
I can get the text not to print, but how do I assign
the classes? 
Thanks in advance.



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