EmAySee Global String Reader

ComfyUI workflows are stateless - every run starts fresh, and there's no built-in way for one workflow to remember something from a previous run or for two workflows to share a value. This node is a pragmatic answer: it reads a string from a plain text file on disk. "Global" here doesn't mean a variable in memory; it means a file in a location you choose, readable from any workflow that knows the path. Write it from one graph, read it from another. That's a surprisingly powerful primitive for automation.

How it works

Given a path and a file_name, it builds {path}/{file_name}.txt and returns the file's contents as a STRING. Three behaviors from the source are worth knowing:

It creates the directory if missing. Missing folder isn't an error; it's just created.
A missing file returns an empty string rather than erroring. That's deliberate and friendly - your first-ever read gets "", not a red node.
It never creates the file. If the file doesn't exist yet, you get the empty string until a writer (like EmAySee_GlobalStringUpdater) creates it. So a reader can sit in a workflow and "wait" for state to appear.

Inputs and outputs

path (STRING) - where to look. Default is O:/custom_nodes/storage, the author's own Windows drive. You will want to change this to a path that exists on your machine, like D:/comfy_state or ComfyUI/user/default/state.
file_name (STRING, default iteration_state) - the base name; .txt is appended automatically. Don't type the extension.

Output: text (STRING). Wire it into a prompt, a text combiner, or downstream logic.

Where it fits

The author's own use case shows in the default file_name (iteration_state) - running state across generations. Reader/Writer pairs are also how you pass a value between two ComfyUI instances pointing at the same filesystem, or hand a value from an external script into ComfyUI without the API. Note the sibling EmAySee_GlobalStringUpdater writes and keeps an append-only history file ({file_name}-story.txt), so if you want a growing record alongside the current state, use that as the writer.

Install

Part of ComfyUI_EmAySee_CustomNodes. ComfyUI Manager → search "EmAySee" → install, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/EmAySee/ComfyUI_EmAySee_CustomNodes

No dependencies, no models - just file I/O. Restart and you'll see the pack's "SPECTRE v5.0" banner.

Gotchas

The default path is a Windows path that doesn't exist on most machines - change it, or the node quietly creates O:/... as a directory (which on Linux/macOS it will literally try to make at the root, and may fail on). Plain text files mean no locking: if two workflows write the same file simultaneously, last-write-wins. And because reads are cached by ComfyUI's normal node caching, a reader may return stale text until the node re-runs - bump a seed or re-queue if it looks frozen.