Scrapy: Difference between simple spider and the one with ItemLoader
Item loaders do exactly the same thing underneath that you do when you don't use them. So for every loader.add_css/add_xpath call there will be responce.css/xpath executed. It won't be any faster and the little amount of additional work they do won't really make things any slower (especially in comparison to xml parsing and network/io load).
I've been working on scrapy for 3 months. for extracting selectors I use simple response.css or response.xpath..
I'm asked to switch to ItemLoaders and use add_xpath add_css etc.
I know how ItemLoaders work and ho convinient they are but can anyone compare these 2 w.r.t efficiency? which way is efficient and why ??