String Find

String Find answers the question "where does this substring start?" with a plain integer. You give it some text and a search string; it returns the 1-based character position of the match - or 0 if there's no match at all. It's the positioning tool in the TakkunRed ComfyUI-String-Function pack, and it earns its keep whenever you need to decide where in a string something lives before you cut it.

You'll most often reach for it as the measuring stick in front of a String Mid or String Split: "the filename always starts 5 chars after 'ID: ', so find that marker and slice from there." That's the workflow you can't build with plain search-within-a-node - you need the offset as a number you can wire into something else.

How it works

Under the hood it's a loop over Python's str.find(), with two knobs that make it more than a bare search:

• start_pos (default 1) - where to begin looking. It's 1-based like everything else in this pack, so a value of 1 means "start at the first character."
• occurrence (default 1) - which match to return. occurrence=2 returns the position of the second occurrence of the search string, not the first. Combined with start_pos you can skip the first N hits and take the next.

The convention matters: 0 means "not found," not "position zero." Positions are 1-based, so a real match always returns 1 or higher. That's a deliberate, pack-wide choice - String Mid uses the same 1-based indexing, so the two nodes agree with each other and with what Excel users expect.

Inputs and outputs

Two required inputs - text and search - plus the two optional knobs above. A single output: position (INT). If the search string is empty or never found, you get 0.

Installing it

Same pack, same nothing-to-download story:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/TakkunRed/ComfyUI-String-Function

Or search "ComfyUI-String-Function" in ComfyUI Manager, restart, and grab it under String Function.

Where people get burned

• Off-by-one everywhere. The output is 1-based and start_pos is 1-based, but if you feed the result straight into a Python-style slice or a String Mid, remember String Mid's start_pos is also 1-based - they line up, which is the point. The confusion starts when you assume one of them is 0-based.
• 0 is ambiguous between "not found" and "empty string match." If you search for an empty string, behavior falls through to the not-found path and returns 0. Don't use it to probe for empty strings - that's String Default's job.
• It finds the first match from the start position, in order. There's no regex and no reverse search here - that's String Regex Match's territory if you need patterns.

One small node, one number, and it slots into the slicing trio (Left / Mid / Right) to make parse-the-prompt graphs you can actually read.