Using Font Awesome Icons as CSS Content

Font Awesome is a popular icon font that provides a wide range of icons for use on websites and applications. One common requirement is to use these icons as CSS content, which can be achieved using the content property in combination with the font-family property set to Font Awesome.

To start using Font Awesome icons as CSS content, you need to include the Font Awesome stylesheet in your HTML document. This can be done by adding a link tag to the head of your HTML file:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/5.15.3/css/all.min.css">

Once the stylesheet is included, you can use Font Awesome icons as CSS content by setting the font-family property to Font Awesome 5 Free (or Font Awesome 5 Brands for brand icons) and using the Unicode character code of the icon as the value of the content property.

Here’s an example:

a:before {
    font-family: "Font Awesome 5 Free";
    content: "\f095"; /* Unicode character code for the icon */
    display: inline-block;
    padding-right: 3px;
    vertical-align: middle;
    font-weight: 900; /* Required for Font Awesome 5 Free */
}

In this example, we’re using the :before pseudo-element to add the icon before the link text. The font-family property is set to Font Awesome 5 Free, and the content property is set to the Unicode character code of the icon (\f095). We’re also adding some basic styling to position the icon correctly.

To find the Unicode character code for a specific Font Awesome icon, you can refer to the Font Awesome cheatsheet.

You can also use this technique to change the icon on hover by adding a separate selector and rules for the :hover action:

a:hover:before {
    content: "\f099"; /* Code of the icon you want to change on hover */
}

To prevent the icon from nudging due to different sizes, you can set a fixed width on the base declaration:

a:before {
    width: 12px; /* Add some desired width here to prevent nudge */
}

Alternatively, you can create a new class that defines the basic styling for Font Awesome icons and then use it with any icon. For example:

.icon::before {
    display: inline-block;
    margin-right: .5em;
    font: normal normal normal 14px/1 FontAwesome;
    font-size: inherit;
    text-rendering: auto;
    -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
    -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
    transform: translate(0, 0);
}

You can then use this class with any icon, like this:

<a class="icon fa-car" href="#">This is a link</a>

By following these steps and techniques, you can easily use Font Awesome icons as CSS content in your web projects.