APNext String Input

Not every node needs to be clever. APNext String Input is the plumbing kind: a text box you type into, with the bonus that it'll glue an incoming string onto whatever you typed. It's the boring, useful node you drop in to hold a reusable snippet, join two pieces of text, or give a workflow one tidy place to edit a prompt. It ships in dagthomas's pack (the SDXL Auto Prompter suite), but it has nothing to do with prompting specifically - it's a generic string utility.

How it works

Type text into prompt. If you also wire something into the optional string input, the node concatenates the two, putting your separator between them, and outputs the combined result. If you leave string empty, it just passes your text straight through. That's the entire behavior - no randomness, no model, no seed, no network. Wherever you'd want a plain STRING you can edit in one spot, this does the job.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• prompt (required, multiline) - the text you type. This is the main event.
• string (optional, multiline) - a second string to merge in, usually wired from another node's output.
• separator (default is a single space) - what goes between the two when both are present. Note it defaults to a space, not a comma like the category nodes in this pack - sensible, since you're usually gluing words or phrases into a sentence. Change it to , if you're building a tag list.

Output: a single STRING, output - feed it into a CLIP Text Encode, another string node, or anything that takes text.

The merge order is fixed (prompt, then separator, then string), so if you need the incoming text first, swap which text goes where - put the incoming string in prompt via an upstream node and your literal in string, or use one of the pack's dedicated merger nodes.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search comfyui_dagthomas or "SDXL Auto Prompter", install, restart. Manual install:

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

Restart ComfyUI. The requirements list looks intimidating (transformers, decord, provider SDKs) because the pack also carries a large set of LLM and vision nodes - StringInput needs none of it and works the moment the pack loads. If you only want this node, you're pulling in a lot of dependencies for a text box; a lighter general-utility pack like rgthree or KJNodes may be the better fit if you don't use the rest of dagthomas.

Common issues & troubleshooting

There's almost nothing to break here. The one thing that trips people up is the separator default being a space - if you're assembling comma-separated tags and wonder why your terms are running together, that's why; set the separator to , . And remember the merge only happens when the optional string input is actually connected; with nothing wired in, the node is just your typed text passed through.

Beyond that, the only real failure mode is the pack not loading at all - which, since it's large and actively developed, is usually a stale copy. A git pull or a Manager update clears it.