Does Mechanize support proxy settings for web scraping?

Yes, Mechanize, a stateful programmatic web browsing library in Python, supports the use of proxy settings for web scraping. You can set up Mechanize to route your HTTP requests through a proxy server by configuring the set_proxies method of a mechanize.Browser object.

Here's a basic example of how to set up a proxy with Mechanize in Python:

import mechanize

# Create a Browser object
br = mechanize.Browser()

# Set the proxy. Replace 'proxy_host' and 'proxy_port' with the actual host and port of your proxy server.
# If your proxy requires authentication, you will need additional setup for that.
proxy = 'proxy_host:proxy_port'
br.set_proxies({'http': proxy, 'https': proxy})

# If the proxy requires authentication, you can specify the username and password like this:
# br.add_proxy_password('proxy_user', 'proxy_password')

# Now you can use the Browser object to navigate pages through the proxy
response = br.open('http://example.com')

print(response.read())

In the above example, you should replace 'proxy_host:proxy_port' with your proxy's actual host and port information. If your proxy server requires authentication, you can use the add_proxy_password method to specify the username and password.

It's important to note that Mechanize is mostly used for Python 2, and its development has been relatively stagnant in recent years. If you're working with Python 3, you might want to consider alternatives like requests for simple HTTP requests or scrapy for more complex web scraping tasks, both of which also support proxies.

If you're using requests, setting a proxy is straightforward:

import requests

proxies = {
    'http': 'http://proxy_host:proxy_port',
    'https': 'http://proxy_host:proxy_port',
}

# If your proxy requires authentication, it can be included in the URL like this:
# proxies = {
#     'http': 'http://username:password@proxy_host:proxy_port',
#     'https': 'http://username:password@proxy_host:proxy_port',
# }

response = requests.get('http://example.com', proxies=proxies)

print(response.text)

Remember to replace 'proxy_host:proxy_port', 'username', and 'password' with your actual proxy details and credentials.