Text to Combo

Every dropdown in ComfyUI is a walled garden: you can pick from the menu, or wire in a value - but a plain STRING wire gets refused, because the dropdown needs to know the choice is one of its own. Text to Combo is the adapter that sneaks text through the gate, and it unlocks a whole category of automated workflow.

What it is

The node is tiny: one STRING in (text), one wildcard out (combo). The output is on a wire type that dropdown inputs accept, so the trick is what you do with the receiving node. ComfyUI lets you right-click any dropdown - checkpoint, LoRA, sampler, scheduler - and convert it to an input. Do that, plug Text to Combo into the new socket, and the choice that used to require your hand is now something the graph decides.

That means the checkpoint, the sampler, or the scheduler can come from a loop, a switch, or any text node. Batch-test ten checkpoints by generating their names in a list and iterating. Pick a scheduler based on a measured condition. Rotate through LoRAs one run per entry. The strip toggle (on by default) trims spaces and line ends off both sides, so euler becomes euler - leave it on unless you genuinely need exact text.

The honesty clause

Text to Combo does not validate anything. If you feed it euler_ancestral and the receiving node has no such option, the refusal happens at the receiving node, not here. So a name spelled differently than the dropdown lists it - wrong case, extra space, a filename that isn't in your models folder - fails downstream with a message about an invalid value.

That's actually the design working as intended: this node is a pure wire-type converter, and the target node is the authority on what it accepts. The practical upshot is to spell options exactly as the dropdown shows them. For a checkpoint that means the exact name.safetensors string, like sd_xl_base_1.0.safetensors.

Where you'll actually use it

The power move is pairing it with the list nodes. A Text Split to List → fan-out into Text to Combo → sampler scheduler input will run the whole pipeline once per scheduler. Same trick feeds LoRA names, VAE choices, upscale methods - anything with a dropdown. It's the difference between a workflow you babysit and a workflow that tests a grid by itself.

One caution, the "anything anywhere" kind: now that any text can drive a dropdown, it's easy to build a graph that silently does something surprising when the text changes. Keep the text source visible and named, and you're fine. This is a precision tool for automation, and it pays to know exactly what string it's carrying at any moment.

Installing it

Part of WAS Node Suite v3 (WASasquatch's was-node-suite-comfyui, MIT). Search "WAS Node Suite v3" in ComfyUI Manager, or:

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

Restart ComfyUI after installing. Requires ComfyUI 0.14.0+ and Python 3.10+; no extra packages needed.