Question

I familiar with the fact that I should set the HTTP_RPOXY environment variable to the proxy address.

Generally urllib works fine, the problem is dealing with urllib2.

>>> urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()

returns

urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 10061] No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it>

or

urllib2.URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 11004] getaddrinfo failed>

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Extra info:

urllib.urlopen(….) works fine! It is just urllib2 that is playing tricks…

I tried @Fenikso answer but I’m getting this error now:

URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 10060] A connection attempt failed because the 
connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established
connection failed because connected host has failed to respond>      

---

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can do it even without the HTTP_PROXY environment variable. Try this sample:

import urllib2

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http":"http://61.233.25.166:80"})
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

html = urllib2.urlopen("http://www.google.com").read()
print html

In your case it really seems that the proxy server is refusing the connection.

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Something more to try:

import urllib2

#proxy = "61.233.25.166:80"
proxy = "YOUR_PROXY_GOES_HERE"

proxies = {"http":"http://%s" % proxy}
url = "http://www.google.com/search?q=test"
headers={'User-agent' : 'Mozilla/5.0'}

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler(proxies)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support, urllib2.HTTPHandler(debuglevel=1))
urllib2.install_opener(opener)

req = urllib2.Request(url, None, headers)
html = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
print html

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Edit 2014:
This seems to be a popular question / answer. However today I would use third party requests module instead.

For one request just do:

import requests

r = requests.get("http://www.google.com", 
                 proxies={"http": "http://61.233.25.166:80"})
print(r.text)

For multiple requests use Session object so you do not have to add proxies parameter in all your requests:

import requests

s = requests.Session()
s.proxies = {"http": "http://61.233.25.166:80"}

r = s.get("http://www.google.com")
print(r.text)