Feature request: add proxy support

[QiangF]

Unfortunately Google is blocked in my country. I have followed online tutorials to setup http, https and socks proxy, but I still get this error.

Error: (error http 429)

[thanhvg]

Sorry, proxy is out of scope of this package. Do you have access to duckduckgo?

[QiangF]

I can access these sites via proxy with eww. My local proxy address is

http://127.0.0.1:7890
socks5://127.0.0.1:7891

Perhaps just some configuration changes will make it work. I have tried to set request-curl-options :

(request-curl-options `(,(format "--proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:7891 -A \"%s\"" (howdoyou--get-user-agent))))

[thanhvg]

Are you referring to this line https://github.com/thanhvg/emacs-howdoyou/blob/master/howdoyou.el#L171?

I think it makes sense, I can add a user setting for curl option. But the change you tried didn't work for you did it? request-curl-options is a list so it should be like this:

(request-curl-options `("--proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:7891"  ,(format "-A \"%s\"" (howdoyou--get-user-agent))))

Also try with curl first to see if the proxy option is correct because it seems to be version dependent. This SO has conflicting suggestions about proxy https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9445489/performing-http-requests-with-curl-using-proxy.

I don't use proxy so there not much help I can provide. I can't image coding without googling. Good luck

One more thing google is also very stingy, they may ban your proxy ip address if their AI is not in a good mood.

[QiangF]

I do get a response for the following code :

(setq howdoyou-use-curl nil)

(let ((url-user-agent (howdoyou--get-user-agent)))
  (url-retrieve "https://www.google.com"
                (lambda (status start-time)
                  (message "The request is completed in %f seconds"
                           (float-time (time-subtract nil start-time)))
                  (display-buffer (current-buffer)))
                `(,(current-time))
                'silent
                'inhibit-cookies))

duckduckgo is not blocked in my country. Perhaps it is less complicated than google.
I guess I have to live with Firefox. Thanks anyway!

[QiangF]

Turns out google think the request is sent by a robot.

HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network.  This page checks to see if it&#39;s really you sending the requests, and not a robot.  <a href="#" onclick="document.getElementById('infoDiv').style.display='block';">Why did this happen?</a><br><br>

[thanhvg]

There is a request to add a google alternative like ddg #22 that I was reluctant to. But now your use case is a strong reason why it is necessary.