Griptape Load: Text

Griptape agents only understand text that's been turned into graph data. This node is the on-ramp: pick a file sitting in ComfyUI's input folder, and out the other side you get the file's path and its full contents as a plain string ready to wire into an agent, a task, or a RAG pipeline. If you've ever hand-copied a system prompt or pasted a rules file into a text box, this is the node that makes that a workflow instead of a chore.

It lives in the ComfyUI-Griptape pack - the griptape.ai team's LLM-agent framework for ComfyUI. While most of that pack is about driving models and agents, this one is deliberately simple: read a file, hand out its contents.

How it works

The node scans ComfyUI's input directory (the input folder next to your custom_nodes) and builds a dropdown of every file whose extension it recognizes. The supported list is broad: .txt, .md, .json, .csv, .tsv, .yaml, .yml, .log, .env, .info, .data, .text - plus .pdf, which is special-cased.

Regular text files get read with Griptape's TextLoader. PDFs go through Griptape's PdfLoader, which extracts the text for you - so a research paper or a manual can be dropped in as-is and become context for an LLM without any separate PDF-to-text step.

The inputs and outputs that matter

Just one input, text - a dropdown of the supported files found in your input folder, with the standard upload widget attached. The outputs:

• PATH - the full path to the file on disk, as a string. Use it if you need to hand the location to a tool that reads files itself.
• OUTPUT - the file's entire contents as one string. This is the one you'll actually wire into things: feed it into an agent's ruleset, a prompt, or a text loader for RAG.

There's a subtlety worth knowing: the dropdown is built when the node initializes, from the files present at that moment. If you drop a brand-new file into the input folder, the node may not see it until you refresh or reconnect the widget - the upload button is the reliable way to get a fresh file into the list.

Installing it

This node ships in the pack, so install once, get everything: ComfyUI Manager → search Griptape → ComfyUI-Griptape → Install, then restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/griptape-ai/ComfyUI-Griptape

Restart, and the pack's dependencies (griptape[all], python-dotenv) come along automatically.

Common issues

Two gotchas trip people up. First, the file must be in the input folder and must match one of the supported extensions - a .docx or a file with no extension simply won't appear in the dropdown. Second, if you've just added a file and it's not listed, remember the list is a snapshot from when the node loaded; re-create or refresh the node, or use the upload widget, rather than hunting for a bug.

For PDFs, remember the heavy lifting runs through Griptape's PdfLoader, which griptape[all] brings in. If PDF loading errors out, it's usually the same root cause as every other issue with this pack: a stale or partially updated griptape install. pip install griptape -U fixes that class of problem more often than not.