📝➜✨ Text to Anything

ComfyUI's type system is usually your friend - it stops you wiring an IMAGE into a socket that wants a MODEL. But sometimes it's just in the way: you have a perfectly good STRING and a downstream node that wants a LIST, or some custom type from another pack, and ComfyUI refuses the connection even though the underlying value would work fine at runtime. Text to Anything exists purely to get around that. It takes a STRING and re-labels it as the wildcard * type, which ComfyUI will let you plug into basically any socket.

It's one of the smaller utility nodes buried in justUmen's Bjornulf_custom_nodes - a 170-node pack that's really three or four sub-toolkits stitched together (text tools, loop/randomization tools, video/ffmpeg tools, and AI integrations like Ollama). The author calls it out in the README specifically for use with his own TTS node, which in some configurations expects something other than a raw STRING on its text input.

How it works

There's no transformation happening to the actual data - the node isn't parsing or reformatting your text. It's purely a type-system trick: take a STRING in, output the exact same value but tagged as * (anything) instead of STRING. ComfyUI's link validation is mostly about labels, not runtime enforcement, so once a socket sees * coming in, it stops complaining and lets the wire connect.

The inputs and outputs that matter

There's really only one input and one output here, which is the whole point of the node:

• text - your STRING, required.
• anything - the same value, now typed *, so you can wire it wherever a stubborn socket was blocking you.

No optional settings, no tooltips to interpret - it's a single-purpose adapter.

How to install it

Through ComfyUI Manager, search "Bjornulf_custom_nodes" and install, then restart. Manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/justUmen/Bjornulf_custom_nodes

restart ComfyUI, done. This node has no dependency of its own beyond core ComfyUI - the pack's requirements.txt (ollama, ffmpeg-python, opencv-python, and friends) is only relevant if you're using the video/TTS/AI side of the pack. On Linux, running ComfyUI inside a venv and installing the pack's requirements there is the recommended setup; Windows portable users install through python_embeded\python.exe -m pip install ....

Common issues & troubleshooting

This is a debugging trap waiting to happen, and the community has opinions about that class of node. ComfyUI's ecosystem has a real, documented backlash against "any type, no questions asked" nodes - a widely upvoted thread specifically titled something like "Please Stop using the Anything Anywhere extension" made the case that erasing type checks makes broken workflows nearly impossible to diagnose, because a wire that's silently wrong just fails downstream with no clue why. Text to Anything is a much narrower tool than that - it's one hop, STRING only, not a general "route anything to anything" system - but the same caution applies in miniature: use it where you've actually confirmed the downstream node can handle a plain string, not as a reflex whenever a socket color mismatches.

Downstream node still errors even after the type check passes. That's expected - this node only gets you past ComfyUI's link validation. If the receiving node's actual Python code expects a list, a dict, or some specific object shape and you hand it a bare string, it'll still blow up at execution time. The node buys you the wire, not correctness.

You reach for it before checking if there's a proper converter. If you're forcing text into, say, an AUDIO or IMAGE socket, that's a sign you want a real conversion node, not a type-system workaround - this node is meant for cases like the TTS example in the README, where the receiving node's input is functionally fine with a string but was declared with a stricter type than it needed. Worth a beat of "is this actually compatible" before wiring it in.