Text to Number

ComfyUI keeps text and numbers as genuinely different socket types, which is fine right up until you have a number arriving as text - read from a file, parsed out of a filename, typed into a text widget because that's the input you had handy - and you need it to actually behave like a number. Text to Number is the bridge: string in, number out, so the value can feed a widget or node input that expects INT or FLOAT instead of STRING.

It's the mirror image of WAS's Number to Text / Number to String nodes, which go the other direction. Between the two pairs, the pack lets you cross the text/number boundary in a WAS graph without ever touching a Python node yourself.

Where it actually gets used

The common case is text arriving from somewhere that isn't naturally numeric-typed: a line loaded from a text file (Load Text File, Text Load Line From File), a value parsed out of a filename with Text Find and Replace, or a piece of a larger string pulled apart with WAS's text tools. Whatever produced the text, once it's a number you can feed it into things that actually do arithmetic or comparisons - WAS's own Number Operation node, a seed input, a resize dimension, anything downstream that expects a real numeric socket instead of a string that merely looks like one.

How it works

It takes a STRING input and converts it to a numeric value the rest of your graph can use as INT or FLOAT. As with any text-to-number conversion, the input has to actually parse as a number - feed it something that isn't numeric and you're relying on whatever fallback behavior the node has, not a guaranteed result, so it's worth sanity-checking the source text upstream rather than assuming it'll always be clean.

How to install it

Via ComfyUI Manager: search "WAS Node Suite," install, restart. Or manually:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/WASasquatch/was-node-suite-comfyui

then, from inside that folder, install the Python deps - path/to/ComfyUI/python_embeded/python.exe -s -m pip install -r requirements.txt on a portable build, plain pip install -r requirements.txt on system Python. Restart ComfyUI; it'll be under the WAS Suite menu.

Common issues & troubleshooting

This node itself is about as simple as WAS gets, so it's rarely the thing that breaks - the pack around it is what causes grief. WAS Node Suite has had no active development since the author retired it in December 2023, and the recurring failure mode reported since then is the entire suite failing to import after a ComfyUI update, not any one node misbehaving. The author's own explanation is that a ComfyUI upgrade can quietly downgrade a shared package WAS still needs for older compatibility (BLIP support was the specific example given), and that version clash breaks the import for everything in the pack at once. If that happens, re-run the requirements install with your embedded Python interpreter specifically - several people who were stuck only got it working that way, not with a system Python.

If a value that looks numeric to you still isn't converting cleanly, check for stray whitespace, a trailing newline from a text file read, or a comma-formatted number (1,000) - those all read as "text" to a human but aren't valid numeric strings, and are the usual reason a text-to-number conversion silently fails or falls back to a default.