The readline return on '' was introduced by the patch for issue 5949, which discusses the fact that SSL may return '' indefinitely in some situations.  I've merged the nosy list from that issue to this one; anyone who isn't interested, my apologies and please delete yourself.  I'm especially hoping that Scott Dial will understand what is going on here and be able to suggest a fix.

I'm guessing this affects all maintained versions, but since that hasn't been tested I'm not updating the versions list.  Ruben, if you can test it with 2.7RC1 that would be especially helpful, since there are other fixes in 2.7 that may affect this, and if this is a regression we'll want to fix it before the next RC.