Use a proxy with urllib2

This snippet from Rob Wolfe:

import urllib2

def getopener(proxy=None):
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPHandler)
if proxy:
proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http": "http://" + proxy})
opener.add_handler(proxy_support)
return opener

def fetchurl(url, opener):
f = opener.open(url)
data = f.read()
f.close()
return data

print fetchurl('http://www.python.org', getopener('127.0.0.1:8081'))
print fetchurl('http://www.python.org', getopener()) # without a proxy