Inspired by Tim Peters' 1.14->1.15 checkin to asynchat Quoting orignal message: ''' Fix from the Madusa mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/medusa/message/333 It's clear that Medusa should not be checking for an empty buffer via "buf is ''". The patch merely changes "is" to "==". However, there's a mystery here all the same: Python attempts to store null strings uniquely, so it's unclear why "buf is ''" ever returned false when buf actually was empty. *Some* string operations produce non-unique null strings, e.g. '''