Hello I know this was a long time ago, but I'm trying to collate some urequests updates now. Do you remember, is there any valid case where this should happen?
I see your change takes affect if there isn't even a status code in the response which appears to be completely invalid http, a quick test shows that cpython requests library gives a long list of exception messages in this case, I don't think we should simply return an empty reponse instead.
I've added a new commit to my working branch inspired by yours here, however I raise a ValueError with an error message instead. Does this sound appropriate to you?

It's been way too long so I really don't remember :D but I think I encountered some API that sometimes had issues so it would immediately close connection and you wouldn't get any data. Because I don't even remember what project it was this seems to not matter anymore and I think your approach should be fine.

Generally even with broken HTTP servers sometimes you still might want to get whatever they returned.

Thanks for the reply, yep that sounds reasonable. I updated my commit slightly to still raise the exception, but then also print out whatever was received as well.

dbd8fff was merged as part of #500 which raises a ValueError as suggested above with a message that should make it clear the error that's occurred. Thanks again!