How can I use a SOCKS 4/5 proxy with urllib2?

You can use SocksiPy module. Simply copy the file "socks.py" to your Python's lib/site-packages directory, and you're ready to go.

You must use socks before urllib2. (Try it pip install PySocks )

For example:

import socks
import socket
socks.setdefaultproxy(socks.PROXY_TYPE_SOCKS5, "127.0.0.1", 8080)
socket.socket = socks.socksocket
import urllib2
print urllib2.urlopen('http://www.google.com').read()

You can also try pycurl lib and tsocks, for more detail, click on here.

Since SOCKS is a socket level proxy, you have to replace the socket object used by urllib2. Please take a look a this solution. If monkey patching is not good enough for you, then you can try to subclass or copy-modify the code from the urllib2 standard library.