The robotparser module handles incorrectly empty paths 
in the allow/disallow directives.

According to: http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-
rfc.html, the following rule should be a global 
*allow*:
User-agent: *
Disallow: 
      
My reading of the RFC is that an empty path is always 
a global allow (for both Allow and Disallow 
directives) so that the syntax is backwards 
compatible --there was no Allow directive in the 
original syntax.

Suggested fix:
robotparser.RuleLine.applies_to() becomes:
    def applies_to(self, filename):
        if not self.path:
           self.allowance = 1
        return self.path=="*" or re.match(self.path, 
filename)

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user_id=21627

This is fixed in robotparser.py 1.11.