Can I use proxies with Scraper (Rust)?

Scraper is a web scraping library for Rust that allows you to parse and query HTML documents using CSS selectors. While Scraper itself is focused on the parsing and querying of HTML and doesn't directly handle HTTP requests, you can use it in combination with other Rust libraries that support HTTP requests and proxies.

If you want to use proxies with Scraper, you should use an HTTP client library that supports proxies, such as reqwest. Here's how you can set up reqwest with a proxy and use it together with Scraper:

1. Add dependencies to your Cargo.toml file:

[dependencies]
scraper = "0.12"
reqwest = { version = "0.11", features = ["blocking", "proxy"] }

1. Use reqwest to make an HTTP request through a proxy and then use Scraper to parse the response:

use scraper::{Html, Selector};
use reqwest::blocking::Client;
use std::error::Error;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    // Set up the HTTP client with a proxy
    let proxy = "http://your-proxy-address:port";
    let client = Client::builder()
        .proxy(reqwest::Proxy::all(proxy)?)
        .build()?;

    // Make a GET request to the target URL
    let url = "http://example.com";
    let response = client.get(url).send()?;

    // Ensure the request was successful and get the response text
    let body = response.text()?;

    // Parse the HTML document with Scraper
    let document = Html::parse_document(&body);
    let selector = Selector::parse("a").unwrap();

    // Iterate over elements matching the selector
    for element in document.select(&selector) {
        let href = element.value().attr("href").unwrap();
        println!("Found link: {}", href);
    }

    Ok(())
}

In the example above, replace http://your-proxy-address:port with the address and port of your proxy server. Also, ensure that the proxy server is set up to handle HTTP traffic and is accessible from your network.

Please note that reqwest supports various proxy types such as HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS. Make sure to configure the proxy correctly based on your requirements. The features = ["blocking", "proxy"] in the Cargo.toml file is necessary to enable the blocking client and proxy support for reqwest.

Keep in mind that using a proxy can help you scrape websites while avoiding IP bans, but always ensure that you are abiding by the website's terms of service and scraping ethically.