Pacparser is a library to parse proxy auto-config (PAC) files. Proxy auto-config
files are a vastly used proxy configuration method these days. Web browsers can
use a PAC file to determine which proxy server to use or whether to go direct
for a given URL. PAC files are written in JavaScript and can be programmed to
return different proxy methods (e.g., "PROXY proxy1:port; DIRECT") depending
upon URL, source IP address, protocol, time of the day etc. PAC files introduce
a lot of possibilities. Please look at the wikipedia entry for Proxy auto-config
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_auto-config) for more information.
The idea behind pacparser is to make it easy to add PAC-file parsing capability to any program (C and python supported right now). It comes as a shared C library and a python module which can be used to make any C or python program PAC scripts aware.
Pacparser makes use of the Mozilla's JavaScript interpreter SpiderMonkey to parse PAC files (which are nothing but javascripts). Apart from that, proxy auto-config standard assumes availability of some functions which are not part of the standard JavaScript. Pacparser uses Mozilla's PAC implementation to define all these functions except for a couple of dns functions which are defined by pacparser itself. As a result, pacparser is as close to standard as it gets :)
For Python module, you can use pip. Pre-built module is available for 64-bit Linux, Windows, MacOS-Intel, and MacOS-ARM, for Python 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11.
python -m pip install pacparser
python -m pip install pacparser==1.3.8.dev15 (specific version)
For other pre-built binaries, download them from the project's releases page.
You can also download the latest binaries from the Github actions artifcacts.
See INSTALL for how to compile pacparser from the source.
Pacparser comes as a shared library (libpacparser.so on Linux, libpacparser.dylib
on MacOS, and pacparser.dll on windows) as well as a python module. Using it is as
easy compiling your C programs against it or importing pacparser module in your
python programs.
>>> import pacparser
>>> pacparser.init()
>>> pacparser.parse_pac('examples/wpad.dat')
>>> pacparser.find_proxy('http://www.google.com', 'www.google.com')
'DIRECT'
>>> pacparser.setmyip("192.168.1.134")
>>> pacparser.find_proxy('http://www.google.com', 'www.google.com')
'PROXY proxy1.manugarg.com:3128; PROXY proxy2.manugarg.com:3128; DIRECT'
>>> pacparser.find_proxy('http://www2.manugarg.com', 'www2.manugarg.com')
'DIRECT'
>>> pacparser.cleanup()
>>>#include <stdio.h>
int pacparser_init();
int pacparser_parse_pac(char* pacfile);
char *pacparser_find_proxy(char *url, char *host);
void pacparser_cleanup();
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
char *proxy;
pacparser_init();
pacparser_parse_pac(argv[1]);
proxy = pacparser_find_proxy(argv[2], argv[3]);
printf("%s\n", proxy);
pacparser_cleanup();
}manugarg@hobbiton:~$ gcc -o pactest pactest.c -lpacparser
manugarg@hobbiton:~$ ./pactest wpad.dat http://www.google.com www.google.com
PROXY proxy1.manugarg.com:3128; PROXY proxy2.manugarg.com:3128; DIRECT
pacparser has been tested to work on Linux (all architectures supported by Debian), FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Win32 systems.
Author: Manu Garg