Load String

Prompts get long. Eventually one of them lives in a .txt file - a caption you wrote elsewhere, a style block you share between workflows, a character sheet you keep editing - and retyping it into a text widget every run is how you end up with drift. Load String reads one text file by path and hands you its contents on a wire, plus the path and the filename as bonuses.

It's the single-file sibling of FairLab's Load String From Directory, and it's the one you want when the file is one file, not a folder full. Feed it an absolute path, get three outputs:

Inputs and outputs

• path (STRING) in - the file location on the machine running ComfyUI.
• string (STRING) out - the file's contents, decoded as UTF-8.
• path (STRING) out - the path you gave it, passed through.
• name (STRING) out - the filename with extension stripped.

Three outputs because downstream nodes often want more than the text: the name is handy for filenames, logging, or matching the file to something else in the graph.

How it works

Straight file I/O: open the path, read it, return. The behavior worth knowing is the failure mode - if the file doesn't exist, this node does not raise. It returns the literal string File not found: <path> as the string output and keeps going. So a typo in the path produces a silent "File not found:" string flowing into whatever consumes it, and you'll see that text rendered into a prompt or a filename before you spot the problem.

Where it fits

The classic setup is a "prompts" folder you keep next to your workflow: each prompt its own file, Load String pointing at the one you're using today. It also pairs naturally with the caption sidecar convention - training pairs live as image.png + image.txt sharing a basename - where reading the .txt into a node that needs the text is a much cleaner flow than copy-pasting.

Install

FairLab is one pack; use ComfyUI Manager (search ComfyUI-FairLab) or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/yanhuifair/ComfyUI-FairLab.git
cd ComfyUI-FairLab
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart after. No pack-specific dependencies needed for this node. It lives under Fair/string.

Gotchas

• Paths are relative to the ComfyUI server, not your browser. In a local install that's the same machine; on a remote or container setup, the file must exist where the backend can see it.
• UTF-8 only. A file saved in another encoding will read as mojibake - the pack ships a Fix UTF-8 String node for exactly that situation.
• Remember the non-raising "File not found:" behavior. If text stops making sense downstream, check the path first.