List Item Selector

ListItemExtract grabs one thing. Its bigger sibling ListItemSelector grabs many - by single index, by slice, or by wildcard pattern - and hands you the result in three different flavors. If you've got a list of prompts, tags, filenames, or seeds and you need "items 1, 3, and 5" or "everything matching *night*", this is the node.

It ships in drmbt/comfyui-dreambait-nodes, and it's one of the genuinely useful ones in that pack. Where ListItemExtract only accepts strings, this one takes any_typ - so a real Python list or tuple from any node that outputs one works, as does a string form.

The inputs that matter

• list_input (any) - a real list/tuple, or a string representation of one. A string that starts with [ and ends with ] gets parsed as a Python literal; anything else gets split on commas and whitespace.
• item_indices (STRING) - the interesting one. Comma- or space-separated tokens, and each token can be:
  • 0 - a single index. Negatives work, so -1 is the last item.
  • 1:5 or 1:8:2 - Python slice notation (start:end:step).
  • cat* - a wildcard, matched case-insensitively against the items.
• debug (BOOLEAN, default true) - prints a running DEBUG: log to the console. Flip it off once you've confirmed it works.

The outputs

Three wires come out:

• any - the selected item(s). One item → the item itself; several → a list.
• string - everything joined into a single text string.
• length (INT) - how many items got selected.

The gotchas

• The string output joins with spaces, not commas. For text workflows feeding back into a prompt, that's usually exactly what you want. If you needed commas, you'll notice.
• Debug is on by default and it's chatty. Expect a wall of DEBUG: lines on your first run. It's the author's own doing and it's genuinely useful for debugging a wildcard that matches nothing - just turn it off after.
• It uses eval() on bracketed strings, not the safer ast.literal_eval. For your own data, fine. For untrusted data, keep it away from the square brackets.
• An empty selection doesn't error. You get empty strings and length 0, which can silently feed an empty prompt if you're not watching the output.

Install

Standard custom-node install:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/drmbt/comfyui-dreambait-nodes

Restart ComfyUI after cloning, or search comfyui-dreambait-nodes in ComfyUI Manager and let it install plus resolve dependencies. The pack's requirements.txt is heavy - transformers, torchaudio, librosa, bitsandbytes, moviepy and more - so the first install is the slow part, and it's the same regardless of which node in the pack you actually wanted.

The takeaway: this is the node you reach for when "grab a few things from a list" turns into a mini query language. Slices and wildcards cover most real use cases without you writing a single Regex node.