Leveraging the power of font awesome icons as background images within React applications

I am facing an issue with my dropdown menu. I have styled the caret using CSS background-image property, but now I would like to use a Font Awesome icon instead.

I attempted to implement two different styles for the background image with no success. The dropdown still appears without a caret icon.

import { FontAwesomeIcon } from '@fortawesome/react-fontawesome';
import { faCaretDown } from '@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons';

backgroundImage: `url("data:image/svg+xml, ${faCaretDown})`
backgroundImage: `url("data:image/svg+xml, ${<FontAwesomeIcon icon={faCaretDown} />})`

This is the original code for my dropdown:

select{
            box-shadow: 0 0 0.2rem rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
            border-radius: 1rem;
            padding-top: 0.25rem;
            padding-bottom: 0.25rem;
            padding-right: 1rem;
            padding-left: 0.5rem;
            border: 0;
            appearance: none;
            -moz-appearance: none;
            -webkit-appearance: none;
            background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml;charset=US-ASCII,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%22292.4%22%20height%3D%22292.4%22%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23007CB2%22%20d%3D%22M287%2069.4a17.6%2017.6%200%200%200-13-5.4H18.4c-5%200-9.3%201.8-12.9%205.4A17.6%2017.6%200%200%200%200%2082.2c0%205%201.8%209.3%205.4%2012.9l128%20127.9c3.6%203.6%207.8%205.4%2012.8%205.4s9.2-1.8%2012.8-5.4L287%2095c3.5-3.5%205.4-7.8%205.4-12.8%200-5-1.9-9.2-5.5-12.8z%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E');
            background-repeat: no-repeat, repeat;
            background-position: right .7em top 50%;
            background-size: .65em auto;
        }
<select type="dropdown">
            <option>Option 1</option>
            <option>Option 2</option>
        </select>
cssreactjssvgbackground-imagefont-awesome

Answer №1

To extract the SVG from the icon, you can utilize the fontawesome-svg-core library. I created this utility function to make it possible for me to also modify the color of the icon (as it does not inherit from CSS when used as a background-image).

import { toHtml, icon } from "@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core";
import { faCaretDown } from "@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons";
const getSVGURI = (faIcon, color) => {
  const abstract = icon(faIcon).abstract[0];
  if (color) abstract.children[0].attributes.fill = color;
  return `data:image/svg+xml;base64,${btoa(toHtml(abstract))}`;
};

<div style={{ backgroundImage: `url(${getSVGURI(faCaretDown)})` }}/>

Explore demo with all icons

If you would rather achieve this without using a library, you can opt for this alternative function:

const getSVGURI = ({ prefix, iconName, icon }, color) =>
  `data:image/svg+xml;base64,${btoa(
    `<svg data-prefix="${prefix}" data-icon="${iconName}"
      xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 ${icon[0]} ${icon[1]}">
      <path fill="${color || "currentColor"}" d="${icon[4]}"></path>
    </svg>`)}`;

Answer №2

Give this a shot

const convertReactSvgToUrl = (Component) =>
  `data:image/svg+xml,${encodeURIComponent(
    renderToStaticMarkup(createElement(Component))
  )}`;

&:after {
    content: url(${convertReactSvgToUrl(FaArrowRight)});
    position: absolute;
    opacity: 1;
  }

However, to achieve this, you must utilize Styled Components

Check out this link on Codesandbox for more information.

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